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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 12 2017, @11:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the Valkyries,-Amazons,...Xena? dept.

DNA proves fearsome Viking warrior was a woman:

A 10th century Viking unearthed in the 1880s was like a figure from Richard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries: an elite warrior buried with a sword, an ax, a spear, arrows, a knife, two shields, and a pair of warhorses. [...] a new study published today in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology finds that the warrior was a woman—the first high-status female Viking warrior to be identified. Excavators first uncovered the battle-ready body among several thousand Viking graves near the Swedish town of Birka, but for 130 years, most assumed it was a man—known only by the grave identifier, Bj 581. [...] Now, the warrior's DNA proves her sex, suggesting a surprising degree of gender balance in the Vikings' violent social order.

Her name was Lagertha.

Reference: Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, et. al., A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.23308


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @03:13AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @03:13AM (#567060)

    Oh please, don't be on a hair trigger. He specifically indicated he was talking about primitive warriors. Additionally, he indicates this is something that not all men were capable of, either. It's not a surprise that not everybody is Gerard Butler's character or Lucy Lawless' character. Xena may not have a real-world counterpart like Leonidas, but there were a few real examples upthread.

    The fact that this idea that women can't be warriors persists with modern technology is a completely different issue, and it's interesting how even feminism is afraid to rock the boat there (have seen some boat rocking, though, so that's good). Despite that, even in present day, there are examples of women warriors. I believe we had two examples a while back.

    Personally, I'd like to know if the cultural conditions that gave us these real-world examples of women warriors both in primitive combat and modern combat were very different, in those times and places vs. our present global civilization. Is it the case that those cultures had more gender equality than our modern culture?

    In the book series I'm reading, which involves primitive-ish combat (sorceries of mass destruction, though, so ymmv), gender equality is a very common trait among humans of various ethnicities. I reserve final judgement until I've finished slogging through all 11,000 pages, but I wish the real world looked a bit more like that world.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @12:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @12:45PM (#567196)

    A burial site discovered in Peru shows that a Chachapoyas war band unit of Indian auxiliaries consisted of both men and women, and at the time of Pizarro their primary weapons were stone maces. Perhaps women were not as strong as men, but in a battle every pair of hands counts. Those chicks were grunts, peasants, not nobility. In times of great turmoil, when history is written, you'll see all humans, men, women, and sometimes even children, taking part. If they aren't, then whatever is going on is all just a make-believe.