# Male vers. female Stone and Bronze Age burial traditions **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 11, 2011, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/male-vers-female-stone-and-bronze-age-burial-traditions/577964 "2011-04-11T15:49:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Toxylon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f05b48/32.png) [@Toxylon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Toxylon)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2011, 9:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/male-vers-female-stone-and-bronze-age-burial-traditions/577964/21 "2011-04-12T09:46:19Z")
> [@kimera](#): > > While in some cultures, such as ours, male homosexuality is associated with femininity, there have been many cultures were male homosexuals were regarded as masculine, even to the point of being considered more masculine than straight men (because they were so manly, they didn’t even want to have sex with a woman!) Can you please give a cite for a few such cultures, preferably from more than one continent? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, is all. (Postmodern humanities seem dedicated to seek out every contra-western-hetero cultural occurence in the global human history and put great emphasis on them when interpreting local prehistories). I’m not being obtuse. I’m just ignorant of the _many_ cultures where homosexuals outranked heterosexuals in the masculinity scale. ---
**Author:** ![Toxylon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f05b48/32.png) [@Toxylon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Toxylon)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2011, 9:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/male-vers-female-stone-and-bronze-age-burial-traditions/577964/22 "2011-04-12T09:59:15Z")
> [@heathen\_earthling](#): > > “In general,” “most,” “typically,” “usually,” “tends to be”… seems like there’s room for skepticism, unless the variation specific to the pelvis really never overlaps at all between the sexes. The professional (highly skeptical) osteologists I’ve talked with seem to have little difficulty determining sex from well-preserved skeletal remains. The University demonstrations I attended years ago pointed out about a dozen spots in the human skeleton where male and female differ, in the pelvis, the skull and elsewhere. When all these match, there’s little room for doubt. Granted, many prehistoric graves contain highly incomplete / degraded skeletons. When this is the case, osteologists readily put “sex indetermined” in their reports. ---
**Author:** ![Toxylon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f05b48/32.png) [@Toxylon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Toxylon)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2011, 10:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/male-vers-female-stone-and-bronze-age-burial-traditions/577964/23 "2011-04-12T10:13:47Z")
> [@Apex\_Rogers](#): > > Anyone else a little bit bothered over the use of “caveman” to describe someone who lived less than 5000 years ago? Yeah, the Corded Ware folks had nothing to do with popular-image “cavemen”. They were copper-casting herdsmen, fishermen and farmers who had wagons, sea-faring watercraft, thatched-roof, mud wall houses, high-quality pottery and extensive communication networks over vast areas. More like Asterix than knuckle-dragging, pelt-wearing, club-swinging half-apes. ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Tildrum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e95f7d/32.png) [@Tom\_Tildrum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Tildrum)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2011, 11:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/male-vers-female-stone-and-bronze-age-burial-traditions/577964/24 "2011-04-12T11:20:13Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > You just made that up didn’t you? 🙂 Totally. (But that’s what any shaman does). 😛 ---
**Author:** ![PoorYorick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@PoorYorick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PoorYorick)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2011, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/male-vers-female-stone-and-bronze-age-burial-traditions/577964/25 "2011-04-12T12:13:16Z")
> [@Toxylon](#): > > The professional (highly skeptical) osteologists I’ve talked with seem to have little difficulty determining sex from well-preserved skeletal remains. The University demonstrations I attended years ago pointed out about a dozen spots in the human skeleton where male and female differ, in the pelvis, the skull and elsewhere. When all these match, there’s little room for doubt. Granted, many prehistoric graves contain highly incomplete / degraded skeletons. When this is the case, osteologists readily put “sex indetermined” in their reports. Right, if you’ve looked at enough skeletons, the sex is usually pretty obvious within a given population, especially if you have a pelvis. Other attributes, like age, can be trickier. The funerary objects found in burial sites for one of the the populations I studied were _always_ sex specific: Women were buried with things like spindles and pottery, men with projectile points and certain kinds of jewelry, children with with toys and puppies (yeah, I know), and some with no artifacts at all. If I had run across a single burial that broke this “rule,” I’d have definitely taken notice. But I agree, while his homosexuality is an intriguing possibility, stating it with certainty is just sloppy. I’ve sometimes seen this in interviews with other anthropologists. “See this bone? Those scars are caused by hypervitamitosis A, therefore this guy died from eating a wolf’s liver.” No, you can’t be sure that’s what the scars are from (paleopathology can be iffy at best), and even if they are from hypervitamitosis A, you can’t say that was the cause of death. I wonder, though, if this often reflects the reporter more than the anthropologist. ---
**Author:** ![DrFidelius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/drfidelius/32/3447_2.png) [@DrFidelius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrFidelius)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2011, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/male-vers-female-stone-and-bronze-age-burial-traditions/577964/26 "2011-04-12T13:49:06Z")
Waffle words are boring. “This indicates that it is likely this individual may have blah blah…” Reporters cut all that stuff out to make the story more interesting. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2011, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/male-vers-female-stone-and-bronze-age-burial-traditions/577964/27 "2011-04-12T19:54:15Z")
> [@j66](#): > > Rather a broad statement for someone deriding sloppy reporting. I didn’t make any broad statements. I offered one possible alternative explanation. ---
**Author:** ![Yllaria](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yllaria/32/3452_2.png) [@Yllaria](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yllaria)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2011, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/male-vers-female-stone-and-bronze-age-burial-traditions/577964/28 "2011-04-12T20:02:40Z")
> [@Tom\_Tildrum](#): > > Women give birth, so they are symbolically buried facing the rising sun, whereas men kill people in war, so they face the setting sun. Hmm. By that system, this could be a man that had never killed anyone. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/male-vers-female-stone-and-bronze-age-burial-traditions/577964.md?page=1)