Buried with an elephant’s tusk, an ivory comb, a crystal dagger, an ostrich eggshell and a flint dagger inlaid with amber, the skeleton discovered in a tomb near Seville, Spain, in 2008 was clearly once someone important.

Based on analysis of the pelvis bone, a specialist initially identified the 5,000-year-old skeleton as a “probable young male” who died between age 17 and 25. A team of European archaeologists dubbed the remains the “Ivory Man,” and began researching what they called a “spectacular” find.

More than a decade later, the researchers used a new molecular method in 2021 to confirm the skeleton’s sex as part of a broader study on the discovery, and they got quite a shock. It turned out that the “Ivory Man” was in fact female. Read more

  • Flying Squid@mander.xyzM
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    1 year ago

    Isn’t it amazing that ostrich eggs and ivory were able to be traded all the way to Iberia in the second millennium BCE? Prehistoric trade networks never cease to amaze me.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Trade networks do not require what we would consider to be civilization and this is not the instance to be doing the Graham Hancock thing.