A recent study has revealed new insights into Stone Age life and death, showing that stone tools were just as likely to be buried with women and children as with men. Breaking millennia-old assumptions about prehistoric life, archaeologists have uncovered compelling evidence that Stone Age women and children were skilled tool users who held far more complex roles than previously imagined. The discovery, from Zvejnieki cemetery in northern Latvia, one of the largest Stone Age burial sites in Europe, challenges the idea that stone tools were strictly associated with men, overturning the old stereotype of “Man the Hunter”.
The site was used for more than 5,000 years, and contains over 330 graves, but until now, stone artifacts found in burials had not been studied, with stone tools at Zvejnieki and other Stone Age burial sites often disregarded as utilitarian and therefore uninteresting.
As part of the Stone Dead Project, led by Dr Aimée Little at the University of York, and working with the Latvian National Museum of History and colleagues across Europe, the team took a powerful microscope to Riga to look at how the tools were made and used.
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