This is Scientific American ― 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin.Picture a women's crew team. Training 18 hours and covering 75 miles in an average week, these athletes are pretty ripped.Yet they don't hold a bicep to prehistoric female farmers.Because a new study shows that, based on upper arm strength, the Neolithic ladies leave modern women―even elite athletes―in the dust.The work appears in the journal Science Advances.The study's researchers had previously examined the bones of prehistoric men.Because bones adapt to the load they bear, they can provide a record of the sort of activities in which an individual regularly engages.So, at the dawn of agriculture, men's leg bones were strong, like today's cross-country runners.But by the late Iron Age, their leg bones looked more like that of the average couch potato."So this kind of matched with declines in mobility as people became more sedentary through time."Alison Macintosh, who did that work when she was an undergraduate student in archaeology at the University of Cambridge."But we didn't see these drops in women.Their leg bone strength was consistently lower than men's, it didn't change significantly through time.So really the women just looked quite sedentary pretty much right from the get-go.And we didn't think that was very probably necessarily a very accurate representation of what they had been doing."Now, it could be that prehistoric housewives sat around and lunched their way through the Neolithic.
