Gender And Class Bias Haven’t Really Changed For 4,000 Years

Imagine you’re a sixteen-year-old girl living in New York City. One day, your mother decides that it’s time for you to leave the nest. You’re going to meet your new husband for the first time, she says. But to get to your new home, you have to walk all the way to Richmond, Virginia. That’s 342 miles away.

Similar treks may have sustained a small community in southern Germany for nearly seven centuries, according to a new study in Science examining the 4,000-year-old group's DNA. By uniting cutting-edge genetic techniques and traditional archeology, researchers reconstructed family trees and traced migration patterns across Europe to reveal a depth of social complexity and inequality that had previously been lost to time.
The study focuses on 104 individuals who lived during the early Bronze Age, when humanity was beginning to swap stone tools for more sophisticated instruments crafted from metal. The pyramids had just been built, the mighty Babylonian empire was in its infancy, and the Code of Hammurabi was soon to be written. "People in the past were very mobile and very much interconnected," says archeologist and lead researcher Philipp Stockhammer. "It's a myth that people were very isolated and simple."
"We know there's social inequality [today]," says Simon Under down, an anthropologist from Oxford Brookes University who was not involved in the recent study. "What this is allowing us to do is shine a light 4,000 years back, and see that the way societies organized themselves... it was pretty similar to how we are now."
Stockhammer and his colleagues studied skeletons hailing from the Lech River valley—an unassuming rural community that spanned just around six square miles, and maintained a surprisingly stable chain of family farmsteads from 2500-1700 BCE. What made the area a perfect place to study, according to Stockhammer, was that each farm had its own graveyard. "We could really see who lived in a farmstead, because the family was buried beside it," he says.
How each person was buried—and what they were buried with—provides a lot of potential information about their social standing. For men, typical grave goods included weapons (daggers, axes, chisels, and arrow heads). For women, elaborate body adornments (like large headdresses and massive leg rings) were the things to bring into the afterlife. Pins, apparently a gender, were buried with both sexes. And in general, more important people had more stuff surrounding their remains.
With dozens of study subjects neatly signaling their social rank, the next step was to try and pull DNA from their skeletons. Usually, ancient DNA is very fragmented and small, weathered down over time due to exposure to heat or moisture or bacteria. So the team was surprised and excited to find that the gravelly, south German soil kept genetic material relatively well-preserved.

By – Abhishek Singh
Content - https://www.popsci.com/archaeology-ancient-dna-social-inequality/