For thousands of years, women in agricultural societies seem to have had arms stronger than members of modern rowing teams.

数千年前，农耕社会时期的女性似乎拥有比现在的赛艇选手更为强壮的手臂。

撰文播音：卡伦·霍普金（Karen Hopkin）

翻译：张艺箫

审阅：潘磊

Picture a women’s crew team.Training 18 hours and covering 75 miles in an average week, these athletes are pretty ripped. Yet they don’t hold a bicep to prehistoric female farmers. Because a new study shows that, based on upper arm strength, the Neolithic ladies leave modern women—even elite athletes—in the dust. The work appears in the journal Science Advances. [Alison A. Macintosh, Ron Pinhasi and Jay T. Stock,Prehistoric women’s manual labor exceeded that of athletes through the first 5,500 years of farming in Central Europe]

想像一支女子赛艇队伍。平均每周训练18个小时，训练里程75英里，这些专业运动员都非常强壮。但是她们也没有古代的女农民那样的肱二头肌。根据一项新的研究，就上臂力量而言，新石器时代的女性使现代女性甚至精英运动员难以望其项背。

The study’s researchers had previously examined the bones of prehistoric men. Because bones adapt to the load they bear, they can provide a record of the sort of activities in which an individual regularly engages. So, at the dawn of agriculture, men’s leg bones were strong, like today’s cross-country runners. But by the late Iron Age, their leg bones looked more like that of the average couch potato.

相关研究人员曾研究过古代男性的骨骼。因为骨骼结构会发生变化来承受负担，所以它们“记录”下了一个人会周期性进行的那类活动。所以，在农耕文明初期，男人的腿骨就像今天的越野赛跑者一样强壮。但到了后铁器时代，他们的腿骨看起来和整天躺在沙发上看电视的现代人差不多。

“So this kind of matched with declines in mobility as people became more sedentary through time.”

这种退化在一定程度上和人们活动量的减少一致，因为慢慢地人们坐的时候越来越多。

Alison Macintosh, who did that work when she was an undergraduate student in archaeology at the University of Cambridge.

Alison Macintosh在她还是剑桥大学考古学专业学生的时候已经完成了这项研究。

“But we didn’t see these drops in women. Their leg bone strength was consistently lower than men’s, it didn’t change significantly through time. So really the women just looked quite sedentary pretty much right from the get-go. And we didn’t think that was very probably necessarily a very accurate representation of what they had been doing.”

“但是在女性中我们看不到这样的退化。女性的骨骼力量一直弱于男人，这在长期演化中并没有明显改变。所以女性似乎从一开始活动量就比男性少得多。而我们不认为那是一种有必要联系起来的具体现象指向古代女性到底从事什么劳动。“

Now, it could be that prehistoric housewives sat around and lunched their way through the Neolithic. But Macintosh thought that unlikely. Instead, she and her colleagues figured that the bones of men and women react differently under pressure. So Macintosh, now a postdoctoral fellow with the same group, decided to look at the limbs of some ladies.

可能在新石器时代，那些史前主妇们围坐在一起，用她们的方式享用午餐。但是Macintosh认为这不可能。相对的，她和她的同事们认为男性和女性的骨骼对压力的响应不同。所以，Macintosh（现在是同团队中的博士后），决定去考察一些女性的四肢情况。

She recruited 18 championship rowers, 11 soccer players, 17 runners and 37 somewhat less sporty undergrads. And she scanned their upper arms and lower legs. What she found is that the leg bone strength of prehistoric women was as variable as that of her living subjects, running the gamut from those who run marathons to those who engage in marathon study sessions. But the arms were a different story.

她招募了18名冠军赛艇选手，11名足球运动员，17名赛跑选手和37名相对锻炼少的在校学生做志愿者。通过扫描她们的上臂和下腿组织，她发现史前女人的腿骨力量和这些志愿者的一样呈现分布，覆盖了从马拉松选手到马拉松初学者整个范围。但是手臂力量就是另一回事了。

“We found that prehistoric women had stronger arm bones on average than most living women. That was pretty consistent through the first 5,500 years of farming or so. So this was even stronger than the arm bones of the rowers. So for example women in the earliest time period that we looked at, which is the early Neolithic period about 7,000 years ago, they had arm bones that were 30 percent stronger than nonathletes today, so just recreationally active women in Cambridge. And they’re about 16 percent stronger bones than those of the living rowers.”

“我们发现史前女性的手臂总的来说比大多数现代女性要强壮。在农耕开始的五千五百年里，这一点是相当一致的。史前女性的手臂骨骼甚至比赛艇选手的更加强健。比如，我们所考察的最早（大约7000年前，新石器时代早期）的女性样本，她们的手臂骨骼比现今的非运动员（比如剑桥大学里游憩活动的女性）强30％，比现代的女子舰艇手强约16％。“

That power most likely came from tilling the soil, harvesting crops, and spending hours a day milling grain to make flour with a stone-age mortar and pestle. The findings shed light on the daily duties of our female ancestors—manual labor that was a total grind.

这种力量很可能来源于耕作土壤，收割庄稼，每天大量时间用在推石墨、捣杵碾碎谷物生产面粉的劳作。这项研究结果揭示了我们女性祖先的日常事务——繁重的体力劳动。