A revered and powerful female leader revealed by new method to determine sex of old bones
Buried with an elephant’s tusk, an ivory comb, a crystal dagger, an ostrich eggshell and a flint dagger inlaid with amber, the skeleton discovered in a tomb near Seville, Spain, in 2008 was clearly once someone important.
Based on analysis of the pelvis bone, a specialist initially identified the 5,000-year-old skeleton as a “probable young male” who died between age 17 and 25. A team of European archaeologists dubbed the remains the “Ivory Man,” and began researching what they called a “spectacular” find.
More than a decade later, the researchers used a new molecular method in 2021 to confirm the skeleton’s sex as part of a broader study on the discovery, and they got quite a shock. It turned out that the “Ivory Man” was in fact female.
“We didn’t not expect it would turn out to be a woman. And this came as a surprise. So, this actually forced us to rethink everything about this site,” said study author Leonardo García Sanjuán, a professor of prehistory at the University of Seville.
What they learned about the woman and the society she lived in opens a new window on the past and will likely force many to reconsider traditionally held views about prehistory.
“In the past, it was not uncommon for an archaeologist to find (remains) and say, ‘OK, this individual has a sword and a shield. Therefore, he’s a man.’ Of course, deeply mistaken, because it assumes that in the past gender roles were the way we conceive them today,” García Sanjuán said.
“This technique, we think, is going to open up an entirely new era in the analysis of the social organization of prehistoric societies.”
Buried with an elephant’s tusk, an ivory comb, a crystal dagger, an ostrich eggshell and a flint dagger inlaid with amber, the skeleton discovered in a tomb near Seville, Spain, in 2008 was clearly once someone important. Based on analysis of the pelvis bone, a specialist initially identified the 5,000-year-old skeleton as a “probable young…