How Stone Age women helped culture spread... while men stayed home!

WOMEN were responsible for spreading new ideas and technology across Europe in the Stone Age – while men stayed home, a study suggests.

Previous theories of how our primitive ancestors travelled have been shaken by analysis of their bones and teeth.

Evidence from burial grounds shows that many women made journeys to villages hundreds of miles from where they were born and raised. By contrast, the teeth of men showed they nearly always remained in the region of their birth.

The status of the foreign women, thought to have carried culture and technology with them between 2,500 and 1,650 BC, is something of an archaeological puzzle.

One possibility is that they cemented alliances between neighbouring tribes. They were buried in the same way as women of the new tribe – on their right side with their heads pointing south – suggesting they were of equal status.

No relations of the travelling women were found, suggesting that either they did not have children or their children moved away. The late Stone Age and early Bronze Age saw innovations in farming, metal working, religion and pottery. The latest research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at the remains of 83 people buried in the Lech valley, just south of Augsburg in modernday Germany. Chemical traces in the remains show that the majority of women came from outside the area, with signatures in their teeth suggesting a journey hundreds of miles from central Germany.

This ‘patrilocal’ pattern, in which the men remained at home, was not a temporary phenomenon but was found to have lasted over 800 years during the transition from the Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age.

The German authors said their work is supported by DNA tests from burial sites across Europe, including in Britain, Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

One of the authors, Dr Corina Knipper, said 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: ‘We were able to ascertain that the majority of women did not originate from the region.’

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

Lead author Dr Philipp Stockhammer, of Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, said: ‘Individual mobility was a major feature characterizing the lives of people in central Europe even in the third and early second millennium.’