If the legends are TRUE, only female warrior’s ascended to Valhalla… just sayin
Oops, Only Valkyrie’s chose whom would enter the Hall of the Slain…
Everyone should have one person in their life who looks at them like Tormund looks at Brienne over that hunk of greasy horseflesh.
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I thought this was straightforward if you had the pelvis, because the female pelvis is so different from the male one.
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Although it’s better if you want to look back at them in that same way.
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Archive under ‘Horror’.
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yeah! women can be blood thirsty manics tooooooo!!!
this happened with the Scythian’s as well they found a horse archers tomb assumed it was male but hips and DNA proved it was a women. its rare but does happen.
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Bah! I just spent way too long trying to find Jaime/ Brienne gifs to reply to this, but it’s all subtle glances across crowded rooms and boring looking scenes involving gifting priceless artifacts of a bygone era so she can do her job. I retreat this time, but the ship war isn’t over!
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Well first if you never bother to look at the pelvis…
Second as I understand it the problem is human variation. We exist on a bell curve after all. So you look in the anatomy text book and see this immediately identifiable feature that’s obvious from the base structure of the bone. When in real life there is this smooth gradient with women clustered on the “wide, splayed pubic bone” end and men clustered on the “narrow inward facing pubic bone” side. Some women have “masculine” pelvises. Some men have “feminine” ones. Often establishing which your looking at involves measuring minute features and calculating ratios of this to that. Especially if the specimen is partial. From what I can tell pelvises are easier but you can do the same thing with jaws, teeth, noses, and the like.
In these cases it’s usually option one. A number of the stories I’ve seen about these re-examinations feature pretty complete skeletons that look like the text book diagram. And people were saying for years “hey that might be a woman”.
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It’s all about ethics in Viking archaeology.
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I wonder if the other vikings knew? Can we get John Edward on the case?
Not to mention cases like this one; a bobcat kitten with gravegoods (!) that had initially been identified as a puppy, and like any good Indiana Jones movie, it mouldered for decades in storage until somebody said “I want to have another look at that puppy with the necklace … What the hell!? This is a bobcat!” Which is to say, dog and bobcat skulls are very, very different, and yet, someone, under pressure with bulldozers at their back, misidentified this very important find.
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Researchers believed the skeleton had been male since it was discovered in Sweden during the 1880s – mostly based on assumptions, The Independent reports.
Since she was buried with arrows, a sword, two horses and other materials designating the skeleton as a “professional warrior,” researchers never considered they were stumbling upon the first female warrior of its kind.
So it wasn’t just merely assumptions based on misogyny or anything, but based on all of the evidence leading up to now?
Certainly there were many examples of women warriors through out history and through various cultures. One of my favorites were the deadly women Russian Snipers of WWII. But the vast majority of warriors through out history were men for a variety of reasons, (some of them due to misogyny). So when faced with pile of bones and relics of a warrior, I think it is a forgivable initial assumption.
Not to say NOW, 2017, we should leave things at that. Since we have the technology now, one would think all specimens should be run through a DNA sequencer to see what we can glean (note, being careful for cross contamination.) It’s pretty damn neat DNA can tell us so much, from the sex and ethnicity of the long dead, to how the various ethnic groups migrated and mingled.
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Logged in today just to click the like button on your post.
They really would have god-like babies.
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Yeah initial descriptions of finds almost never seem to be … useful? Even when accurate they often miss major stuff. Which is why none of it counts until things are formally described and published. But the sheer volume of stuff that never makes it to that point is astounding. There are whole buildings at AMNH that are just filled with unpublished, roughly cataloged stuff.
As a kid I’d read all those books where adventuresome young-uns would end up locked in a museum overnight and discover something. And I always thought “No dudes you’re in the wrong part, you need to be across the street!”. I was that kid who on museum trips would poke his head into doors you weren’t supposed to go through and interrogate whatever grad student I found there. Some researcher I cornered at some point told me all the good stuff was in the back and I haven’t been able to get the idea out of my head since.
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That’s exactly the one I was thinking of. But it did seem to happen in waaaaaay too many children’s books at the time.
From the article:
"When early analyses indicated the body was female, some suggested that the objects buried alongside her belonged to someone else.
This type of reasoning takes away the agency of the buried female,” the researchers write. As long as the sex is male, the weaponry in the grave not only belong to the interred but also reflects his status as warrior, whereas a female sex has raised doubts.
To quash those doubts, the researchers took a DNA sample from the skeleton’s arm and tooth. The sample revealed a lack of Y chromosomes, signalling that the individual was female. The scientists also noted that the skeleton’s bones were “thin, slender and gracile” like a woman’s, further supporting their conclusions."
Cultural conditioning is some strong medicine.
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