"The Science of Real-Life "Wonder Women" is Rewriting..." Topic

… HUMAN HISTORY

"IN 1988, ARCHAEOLOGISTS UNEARTHED A WOODEN SARCOPHAGUS at a grave in the Russian region Tuva.

The individual inside wore a red leather headdress and a fur coat closed with a bronze buckle. The body was flanked by a leather quiver filled with arrows — evidence enough for the archaeologists to suggest that this was a warrior's grave. Specifically, they speculated this was a 13 year-old male Scythian warrior – a member of an ancient tribe of nomads whose range extended from the Black Sea to China between 2000 and 3000 years ago…"

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Armand

In all of time, women warriors make up what, one out of a million warriors? Probably a lot more?? Not to disparage women warriors, but this one grave isn't going to "rewrite" history, FFS. Nor will the "Amazons, Ancient and Modern" FB page cause a paradigm shift. Facts (and biology--you know, science) are that historically women bore children (and still do, last I checked) and are the nurturers, despite all the people that are hell-bent on changing THAT paradigm!

Glup!

Armand

One in a million is probably an underestimate. Records from the U.S. Sanitary Commission for the American Civil War indicate that about 400 female soldiers were detected, so about one in 15,000. Of course, since they enlisted under male names, if they didn't get found out and didn't brag about it after the war, they wouldn't be included in the 400. So, the total was probably more than 400. Even so, if we could have gotten them all together, maybe there would have been enough to form one regiment, so yes, they were there, but not really statistically significant.
Carrying those percentages over into the Middle Ages, Denmark had about 1,000,000 people in 1000, so there might have been 89 female warriors at that time. Had all of them been killed in one battle, it would not have seriously impacted Denmark's population growth.
The thing is that any history, and almost any archaeological era we look at involves human use of weapons, i.e., tools, which are force multipliers. I have more upper body strength than most females, but give a girl a rock, and she has a decent chance of landing a fatal blow. Weapons have improved significantly since the days of the rock. The Soviet female snipers of WWII indicate that women can be trained to use weapons effectively.
So, I understand that you cannot automatically assume that a grave with weapons is male and one with keys is female, the way we used to.
I tend to view the situation in terms of the Hegelian dialectic:
Thesis: women are incapable of engaging in combat.
Antithesis: women can do all sorts of incredible combat things
Synthesis: Well, in some cases women make good fighters and others, not so much.
Right now, we're kind of in the Antithesis segment, and OMG the media are glorying in it!
I think when we come to the Synthesis part, people are going to do some serious thinking about when and to what degree women should engage in combat.
Grelber

I don't think a few graves are going to produce a "paradigm shift" regardless of what the current commissars of "the message" want or wish for.

Did the Amazons exist? You would get as many theories and answers as asking if Atlantis or Lemuria existed. Is it possible? Yes. Is it provable? No. Unless and until evidence is found, I'll file this article in the 'Interesting but Speculative' folder.

Regarding women as warriors – I think that as Greiber pointed out, yes, women can be trained. However, isn't it interesting that no swords have been found in these graves, only arrowheads? It would seem to indicate that if women warriors did exist, they were archers, not sword and spear/shield types. So, could it be that they were not warriors per se but hunters? Finally, what is a 'combat wound' in this time period? A crushing blow to the skull? A cut in the bone of the femur or arm? A puncture wound on the rib cage?

I know that a forensic pathologist can determine the cause of death, as can a forensic archeologist but I'm a bit leery of activists attributing every cut or blow on the bones of an interred person to 'combat'. After all, how can one tell if the female in question didn't burn supper and her idiot husband struck her with his sword or shot her with his arrow?