L’intensification de l’agriculture a beaucoup plus sollicité les membres supérieurs des femmes, bâties sous ce rapport comme des athlètes de haut niveau d’aviron, que leur membres inférieurs et donc (?) que leur mobilité.
Prehistoric women’s manual labor exceeded that of athletes through the first 5500 years of farming in Central Europe | Science Advances
►http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/11/eaao3893
Abstract
The intensification of agriculture is often associated with declining mobility and bone strength through time, although women often exhibit less pronounced trends than men. For example, previous studies of prehistoric Central European agriculturalists (~5300 calibrated years BC to 850 AD) demonstrated a significant reduction in tibial rigidity among men, whereas women were characterized by low tibial rigidity, little temporal change, and high variability. Because of the potential for sex-specific skeletal responses to mechanical loading and a lack of modern comparative data, women’s activity in prehistory remains difficult to interpret. This study compares humeral and tibial cross-sectional rigidity, shape, and interlimb loading among prehistoric Central European women agriculturalists and living European women of known behavior (athletes and controls).
Prehistoric female tibial rigidity at all time periods was highly variable, but differed little from living sedentary women on average, and was significantly lower than that of living runners and football players. However, humeral rigidity exceeded that of living athletes for the first ~5500 years of farming, with loading intensity biased heavily toward the upper limb. Interlimb strength proportions among Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age women were most similar to those of living semi-elite rowers. These results suggest that, in contrast to men, rigorous manual labor was a more important component of prehistoric women’s behavior than was terrestrial mobility through thousands of years of European agriculture, at levels far exceeding those of modern women.
De la conclusion (longue, car commentant longuement l’interprétation de ces résultats)
The current study highlights the importance of female comparative data and a female-specific context for the interpretation of female behavior in the past. By interpreting prehistoric human behavior relative to women of known behavioral repertoires, this study has documented thousands of years of very high manual labor among agricultural women in the mid-Holocene of Central Europe. Mean humeral rigidity exceeded all living female means until the Late Iron Age, and loading was biased heavily toward the upper relative to lower limb until the Late Iron Age/Early Medieval period, when it redistributed to a more characteristically modern female pattern. Prehistoric women were also more variable than living women; often, a single time period contained individuals encompassing the entire range of values documented among the entire group of living women ranging from sedentary controls to ultramarathon runners, particularly among the earliest prehistoric populations. This is suggestive of the performance of a wide range of behaviors by early agricultural women in Central Europe and may explain the homogeneity in between-population variation in tibial morphology in females.
