So this is the first study  that
actually compares bone strength and
prehistoric women to those of actually
living women. We have some data from
living men but nobody's ever scanned any
women to to provide a comparative data
set and this matters because men and
women don't build bone in the same way
to loading. A lot of people forget that
the skeleton is actually alive it's a
tissue that responds to loading it
responds to what you're doing in your
life and it will change accordingly
so if you for example are a runner I
mean you're exerting a lot of loading on
your legs your bones will respond by
they're adding more bone or moving bone
around so that it's strong enough for
that particular sort of activity that
you're doing. When we look at athletes or
living people where we actually know
what they're doing
we can start to link characteristics in
their bones to what they're actually
doing in their life so that when you
just have a skeleton from someone who
lived thousands of years ago we can
start to look for similarities in the
shape and strength of the bone with a
living person and then work our way
backwards to interpret how that
prehistoric person might have been
loading their bone. I recruited from the
Cambridge University women's boat club
because I wanted a sport that loads the
arms I had a lot of runners and soccer
players but they're not really doing
anything with their arms. The good thing
about rowing is it's not really high
impact like a sport like tennis would be
on the arms but it is really repetitive
and really labour-intensive there there's
a huge amount of muscle force to row.
Their training volume was twice as high
as the other sports I had. So what we
found was really really strong arm bones
in prehistoric women compared to all of
the living women even the rowers. Well we
think the main activity that they would
have been doing that is contributing to
these really strong arms is processing
grain this is when you'd have been
farming by hand essentially so there's
no plough yet
therefore they're planting by hand
they're making grain by hand, this would
have involved hours of manual labour this
was done by hand with what's called a
saddle Kern it involves kind of grinding
the grain against a stone with another
stone that's really really repetitive
and labour-intensive. In modern
traditional farming societies this is
usually women that do this and it can
account for up to five hours a day of
manual labour for them. I think a lot of
the time we underestimate women's
loading, women's behaviors because
women's bones don't respond to loading
in as extreme away as men's do, so often
trends in men look really exciting and
women are more difficult to interpret
what we're seeing because women do so
many different things in their daily
life so what was really great was being
able to to highlight the thousands of
years of really intense manual labour
that women were doing. And it's that
manual labour that really provided the
driving force allowing for the
development and expansion of production
economies once we start farming. We
wouldn't have this sort of expansion
that we saw without those sort of unseen
hours of women's work.
