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from the round-round-get-around-I-get-around dept.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-09/mpif-mww090117.php
At the end of the Stone Age and in the early Bronze Age, families were established in a surprising manner in the Lechtal, south of Augsburg, Germany. The majority of women came from outside the area, probably from Bohemia or Central Germany, while men usually remained in the region of their birth. This so-called patrilocal pattern combined with individual female mobility was not a temporary phenomenon, but persisted over a period of 800 years during the transition from the Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age.
The findings, published today in PNAS, result from a research collaboration headed by Philipp Stockhammer of the Institute of Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology and Archaeology of the Roman Provinces of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. In addition to archaeological examinations, the team conducted stable isotope and ancient DNA analyses. Corina Knipper of the Curt-Engelhorn-Centre for Archaeometry, as well as Alissa Mittnik and Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena and the University of Tuebingen jointly directed these scientific investigations. "Individual mobility was a major feature characterizing the lives of people in Central Europe even in the 3rd and early 2nd millennium," states Philipp Stockhammer. The researchers suspect that it played a significant role in the exchange of cultural objects and ideas, which increased considerably in the Bronze Age, in turn promoting the development of new technologies.
For this study, the researchers examined the remains of 84 individuals using genetic and isotope analyses in conjunction with archeological evaluations. The individuals were buried between 2500 and 1650 BC in cemeteries that belonged to individual homesteads, and that contained between one and several dozen burials made over a period of several generations. "The settlements were located along a fertile loess ridge in the middle of the Lech valley. Larger villages did not exist in the Lechtal at this time," states Stockhammer.
[DOI not yet available]
Female exogamy and gene pool diversification at the transition from the Final Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age in central Europe (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1706355114) (DX)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @01:22PM (5 children)
My own interpretation is that this is some kind of bullshit that will be used to push some sort of feminist agenda, much like the "shield-maiden" nonsense. Did you know that when men invaded they would kill the men and boys, and then take the women back with them? That's how Rome got started. The women did not fucking "travel around" in those circumstances. God I hate the world right now where every scientific, technological, and medical field is overrun with useful-idiots with agenda and you cannot trust the hand in-front of your face.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by looorg on Tuesday September 05 2017, @02:01PM (2 children)
You do get the distinct feeling there are some things missing, potentially a large amount of wishful thinking. They almost make it sound like there was a group of women just walking around southern Germany, where Augsburg is located, checking out the sights and settling where they pleased and then move around a bit while the men just stayed at home. I would call massive bullshit on that idea unless proven otherwise. The way you make war at the time, it's still how you make primitive wars today, you take your tribe and villages and you go to the other villages and tribes an kill all the males (men and boys) you can find and you grab all females (girls and women) to bring back home as slaves and/or future wife material. They (females) have value while men have very little value after all and they also come with a larger risk and threat, females rarely pose any.
(Score: 1) by SomeRandomGeek on Tuesday September 05 2017, @03:52PM (1 child)
You're both reasoning beyond your data. The evidence indicates that each successive generation of men in this time and place were descendants of the previous, while each successive generation of women were not.
This could be explained by men raiding for women, then bringing them back home. Or it could be explained by the trafficking of women. Or it could be explained by young people peacefully traveling about seeking mates, then settling with the man's family.
All of these explanations correspond to observed human behavior at other times and places. Without further evidence, there is no way to know what combination of these or other behaviors were actually happening.
The data do seem to exclude some other interpretations. For example, clearly we don't see men attacking a settlement, killing off all the local men, and settling there with the local women. At least not in this small sample of 84 graves. It could have happened in the next village over.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday September 05 2017, @06:51PM
We may never know, but some scenarios are far more likely than others. LoL on your Number 3! I don't think you have much idea of what life in the bronze age was like : young people did not "peacefully travel about" like pre-historic gap-year students.
An earlier poster mentioned how Rome was founded. He was referring to this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Sabine_Women [wikipedia.org] . Although this incident (around 800 BC) has been romanticised* in legend and art, there is no doubt that something like it took place, nor is there any doubt that such incidents were not unusual either then or throughout history (including now).
* Ignore the togas and classical architecture in the pictures in the link - Romulus and his men were runaways, bandits and criminals living in a shanty town (Rome was not built in a day). They decided they needed women.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday September 05 2017, @02:24PM
You're thinking too modern - they're talking over 2000 years before the Roman empire existed, 500 before even the seed-state of the Babylonian empire began to form. May as well use modern society as a guideline for what pre-Christian culture looked like.
In a more regionally-relevant context, this was the birth-time of the early Celtic religion, and civilization consisted of small villages dotted across the landscape. Paganism and the associated empowerment of women was thriving. Which doesn't rule out taking women as the spoils of raiding parties, but that would have almost certainly been only been from relatively nearby villages - traveling for days or weeks tends to eat any profit from simple raiding, especially overland. And this was over 2500 years before the dawn of the Viking Age.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @05:09PM
OK, OK, you can put your persecution complex back in it's holster again. (And who the hell are the idiots modding this up as "Insightful", of all things?!?) There are plenty of ways in which women and girls of this Early Bronze Age era could have been "mobile". As examples, we have suggestions in other comments of men travelling abroad and bringing wives back with them, to trafficking of women as slaves, to women taken as the spoils of war. All of these are plausible, as well as at least a few other hypotheses. I didn't see any mention in the summary of women freely travelling in this era. And as per tradition, no, I didn't bother to read the article. No reason to go full-bore MRA on us.