Discovered the only female warrior from the Stone Age

A mysterious 6,500-year-old woman's grave and several arrowheads have just been discovered in northern France that may reveal details about the treatment of women in the Neolithic period.

Researchers have studied huge tombs hundreds of meters long in rotting wooden planks. Of 19 graves at the Neolithic cemetery at Fleury-sur-Orne in Normandy, France, the team analyzed the DNA of 14 individuals; but only one is a woman.

The only female grave is buried in a monumental cemetery in Normandy, Neolithic France.

The Mystery of the Woman's Grave

The woman was buried with arrows "representing men" in her grave.

Lead author of the study Maïté Rivollat, an archaeologist and geneticist at the University of Bordeaux, France, said: 'We believe that artifacts belonging to men have gone beyond biological gender identity. . This implies that she incarnated as a man when she died to be buried in this cemetery."

Archaeologists believe that the rocks at Fleury-sur-Orne belong to the Cerny Neolithic culture. Several other Cerny cemeteries have been found hundreds of kilometers away in the southeastern Paris region, but Fleury-sur-Orne is the largest found in Normandy.

Despite sharing the same Cerny culture, the cemetery in Fleury-sur-Orne is mostly reserved for men, hunters, so it was a surprise to find a woman's grave here.

The Neolithic cemetery at Fleury-sur-Orne near Caen was discovered in aerial photographs in the 1960s, and the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap) led an excavation. Rescue excavation there since 2014 .

Signs of a patriarchal community

Clues as well as DNA analysis suggest that those buried at Fleury-sur-Orne were from a patriarchal community - in which social power was inherited by male lineage, while daughters Family girls leave to live with their in-laws.

Previous studies of the Cerny cemetery in the Paris basin had distinguished "powerful individuals" by being buried with arrows, guns and possibly bows - perhaps thereby identifying them as "hunters" ".

It is not known whether the woman buried at the Cerny cemetery in Fleury-sur-Orne is officially considered a "hunter" by the community, but this woman is buried with four arrowheads, one This type of artifact is considered exclusively male in its associations in the Cerny culture.