Girl Power

Girl Power

A new archaeological find is giving new meaning to “girl power.”

That’s because a recent analysis of female bones from 5,300 BC to 100 AD revealed that most ancient women possessed 30 percent more upper-body strength than today’s non-athletic females, the Guardian reported.

And that’s all thanks to some good old-fashioned manual labor, researchers posit.

“We think a lot of what we are seeing is the bone’s response to women grinding grain, which is pretty much seated but using your arms really repetitively many hours a day,” said Alison Macintosh, the study’s co-author.

As time passed, researchers observed a slight reduction in strength, mostly due to technological developments in farming. Nevertheless, until the Middle Ages, female upper-body strength still surpassed that of modern athletes.

The study is changing perceptions of women’s role in ancient societies.

“It’s highlighting those hours of work that women have been doing that have been hidden in the archaeological record until now,” Macintosh said.