Women spread culture, men stayed at home during Stone Age

Berlin: Women during the early Stone Age and Bronze Age travelled from home villages to start families, spread culture, ideas and knowledge around Europe while men stayed at home, a study has found.

At the end of the Stone Age and in the early Bronze Age, families were established in a surprising manner in Germany, researchers said.

The majority of women came from outside the area, probably from Bohemia or Central Germany, while men usually remained in the region of their birth.

This so-called patrilocal pattern combined with individual female mobility was not a temporary phenomenon, but persisted over a period of 800 years during the transition from the Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age, they said.

"Individual mobility was a major feature characterising the lives of people in Central Europe even in the 3rd and early 2nd millennium," said Philipp Stockhammer from Ludwig- Maximilian University of Munich in Germany.

Researchers suspect that it played a significant role in the exchange of cultural objects and ideas, which increased considerably in the Bronze Age, in turn promoting the development of new technologies.

They found that the settlements were located along a fertile loess ridge in the middle of the Lech valley. Larger villages did not exist in the Lechtal at this time.

"We see a great diversity of different female lineages, which would occur if over time many women relocated to the Lech Valley from somewhere else," said Alissa Mittnik of Max Planck Institute in Germany.

"Based on analysis of strontium isotope ratios in molars, which allows us to draw conclusions about the origin of people, we were able to ascertain that the majority of women did not originate from the region," said Mittnik.

Researchers also found that the burials of the women did not differ from that of the native population, indicating that the formerly foreign women were integrated into the local community.

"It appears that at least part of what was previously believed to be migration by groups is based on an institutionalised form of individual mobility," Stockhammer added.

The team examined the remains of 84 individuals using genetic and isotope analyses in conjunction with archaeological evaluations.

The individuals were buried between 2500-1650 BC in cemeteries that belonged to individual homesteads, and that contained between one and several dozen burials made over a period of several generations.