"I think it is an important addition to a growing body of evidence of personal ornament usage in Neanderthals, now spanning more than 80,000 years," says Davorka Radovčić, a curator at the Croatian Natural History Museum, Zagreb, who studied the talons at Krapina but was not involved in the new study. We think that the talons are related to the symbolic world of the Neanderthals," Rodríguez says. While it's difficult or even impossible to know what these symbols actually meant to Neanderthals, their use may imply that Neanderthals were practicing a form of communication.

"We're looking at evidence of traditions that have to do with social identification," says John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wasn't involved in the study. "Why do you wear ornaments? Why do you go through this trouble? Because you notice something interesting, you want to associate yourself with it, [and] you want it to mark yourself for other people to recognize." Neanderthals are also known to have made birch tar as an adhesive, suggesting they were capable of human-like planning and complex cognition. But a few months ago, another research team published a study claiming that birch tar wasn't actually so hard to make and shouldn't be used as an example of Neanderthals' cleverness.

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In other words, there is very little in the history books to support the claim that the skeleton in Bj. 581 was a Viking woman warrior. In fact, we can't say for certain that this individual was a woman, a warrior, or even a Viking.

While the DNA evidence suggests this skeleton belonged to a female [...]

On the one hand, there seems to have been a clear delineation between men and women: On the family farm, chores were gender-coded as either male or female; from the sagas, we learn that cross-dressing was grounds for divorce. On the other hand, it wasn't uncommon for female skeletons to be buried with male-coded objects, such as weapons. We still don't know what this meant to the Vikings, but it does mean that Bj. 581 is not unique.

That the individual buried in Bj. 581 was a warrior is also hard to confirm, because as professor of Viking studies Judith Jesch observed, the skeleton shows no marks or wear that might be associated with battle wounds.

Finally, the grave objects in Bj. 581 are not Scandinavian, which raises the question of whether this person was a Viking at all. Instead, the weapons, the clothes, and the animals found in this grave seem to have originated nearer the Caspian Sea, which is located in Central Asia.

[...] upper-class men and women generally were buried with the same types of items - including cooking gear.

"The key is a good example. It is often considered to be the symbol of a housewife," Moen said. Nonetheless, almost as many men's graves had keys as women's graves.

However, from his own work in Vestfold, he had the impression that farmers were much more concerned with marking gender in their graves than the upper-class citizens, although he points out that this was not the focus of his research.

There are still a few clear differences between genders for the elite. Men generally have weapons in their graves, while women have jewellery and textile tools, as Moen's work shows. More than 40 per cent of the male graves contained jewellery such as brooches and beads.

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