© David Hunt, North Carolina State UniversitySkulls from a forensic anthropology lab.
Stone Age farmers lived through routine violence, and women weren't spared from its toll, a new study finds.
The analysis discovered that up to 1 in 6 skulls exhumed in Scandinavia from the late Stone Age - between about 6,000 and 3,700 years ago - had nasty head injuries. And contrary to findings from mass gravesites of the period, women were equally likely to be victims of deadly blows, according to the study published in the February issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Ancient pastoralistsLinda Fibiger, an archaeologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and her colleagues focused on the late
Stone Age, when European hunter-gatherers had transitioned into farming or herding animals.
Mass graves unearthed from that time in Talheim and Eulau, Germany, contained mostly males who had died in violent conflicts. As such, researchers had thought women were spared from conflicts due to their potential childbearing value, Fibiger told LiveScience.
But looking only at the aftermath of big, bloody conflicts can obscure the day-to-day realities of
Neolithic farmers.
"It would be like only looking at a war zone to assess violence," Fibiger said. "That's not going to tell you what's going on in your neighborhood."