“Bone Study Reveals Prehistoric Women Had Insanely Strong Arms”

Jess Brooks
Genders, and other gendered things
1 min readFeb 10, 2019

“Previous studies only compared female bones to contemporary male bones, the researchers said — and that’s a problem, because the response of male bones to stress and change is much more visibly dramatic than that of women…

Macintosh’s team recruited Cambridge athletes such as rowers and runners, as well as more sedentary volunteers, and used a small CT scanner to analyse their arm and leg bones…

What they found was that women’s leg strength hasn’t changed a great deal over the millennia — but powerful arms used to be the norm. Neolithic women, the researchers found, had arm strength 11–16 percent stronger than those of modern rowers, and 30 percent stronger than those of non-athletes.”

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Jess Brooks
Genders, and other gendered things

A collection blog of all the things I am reading and thinking about; OR, my attempt to answer my internal FAQs.