Women were the key to spreading culture around Europe

Women were the ‘driving force’ spreading new ideas and technologies across Britain and Europe during the Stone Age – while their menfolk stayed home, a surprising new study has found.

Previous ideas of how our primitive ancestors travelled have been shaken by analysis of bones and teeth from ancient peoples.

They show that many females found buried in ancient burial grounds made long journeys to distant villages far from the homesteads where they were born and grew up.

And as they did so they are thought to have carried culture and technology with them between 2,500 and 1,650 BC.

The men, by contrast, by and large had stayed in the same area their whole lives – as shown by dental and bone records.

The exact status of the foreign women is something of an archaeological puzzle. 

One possibility is that the women were ‘Queens of the Stone Age’ – used to cement alliances between neighbouring tribes.

However, the women were not buried any differently to other women closely related to their menfolk – suggesting they were of equal status to their local female neighbours.

Another puzzle is that no genetic relations of the women were found – suggesting either that the travelling women did not have children, or that their children moved away.

The late Stone Age and early Bronze Age were times of technological revolution, in farming, metal working, religion, and pottery.

The new research suggests that women had an important role in transmitting the latest breakthroughs in Stone Age and Bronze Age culture and technology – given that it was the females who were on the move, rather than the men.

The research published in the journal PNAS focused on the Lech river valley, south of Augsburg.

But the authors said their work is also supported by DNA tests on remains in a host of other similar late Stone Age and early Bronze Age burial sites – including Britain, Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

Researchers studied the teeth and bones of some 83 individuals buried around the Lech valley, in southern Germany.

Chemical traces in the teeth and bones show that the majority of women came from outside the area, with signatures in their teeth suggesting a journey of hundreds of miles from Bohemia or Central Germany. 

The teeth of the men showed that they nearly always had 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.

For the study, the researchers examined the remains of 84 people using genetic and isotope analyses in conjunction with archaeological evaluations

The authors said the burial sites ranged from individual homesteads, containing between one and several dozen burials made over a period of several generations.

One of the authors, Corina Knipper said that the analysis of teeth was able to reveal where the women grew up.

Deposits in tooth enamel showed ‘a great diversity of different female lineages, which would occur if over time many women relocated to the Lech Valley from somewhere else.’

She added: ‘Based on analysis of strontium isotope ratios in molars, which allows us to draw conclusions about the origin of people, we were able to ascertain that the majority of women did not originate from the region.’

The burials of the women did not differ from that of the native population – showing they were fully integrated into the local community.

The ‘foreign’ women would typically be buried on their right side with their heads pointed south. Men were buried on their left side with their heads pointed towards the north.

The authors say the insights ‘prove the importance of female mobility for cultural exchange in the Bronze Age’.

Philipp Stockhammer, lead author, said ‘Individual mobility was a major feature characterizing the lives of people in Central Europe even in the 3rd and early 2nd millennium‘