A recent study carried out by a multidisciplinary team from the University of Granada has revealed a surprising discovery in the megalithic necropolis of Panoría, located in Darro (Granada, Spain). The research, led by the GEA group of this university, has focused on analyzing the bone remains found in nine graves of this necropolis, where twice as many women as men were buried. This phenomenon is especially pronounced in the younger population, where the ratio reaches 10 women for every man, a fact that has puzzled researchers and raises new questions about the funerary practices of prehistoric societies in the region.
The Panoría necropolis, located at the eastern end of Sierra Harana, is an archaeological site consisting of at least 19 graves. Of these, nine were excavated between 2015 and 2019, and more than 55,000 human bone remains have been recovered, making this site a valuable source of information for understanding the social and funerary dynamics of the societies that inhabited the area thousands of years ago. Analyses have allowed these remains to be dated to a period spanning from 5,600 to 4,100 years ago, meaning the necropolis was in use for approximately 1,500 years.
What has most caught the attention of the research team is the gender ratio bias. The existence of two women buried for every man, or even ten women for every young male, is a pattern that does not correspond to what is expected in human populations, where the usual gender ratio is close to one to one.
Under normal circumstances, this distribution tends to be fairly balanced, and only in very particular contexts, such as wars, mass migrations, or natural disasters, can significant imbalances be observed. However, in the case of Panoría, this bias has been maintained for more than a millennium, suggesting that it is not an isolated or temporary phenomenon but rather a deeply ingrained social practice.
This finding leads the researchers to propose that the overrepresentation of women in the Panoría graves reflects a social organization centered on women. This could be explained, in part, by the existence of family structures based on matrilineal descent, where the importance of the maternal lineage was predominant in family and social relationships.
According to this hypothesis, women occupied a central role in Panoría society, which granted them a special status in funerary rituals. Additionally, the scarcity of young men in the graves could be explained by male exogamy, a social practice documented in various cultures throughout history, in which young men leave their original group to join others, while women remain in their family group.
In any case, the results of this study suggest a complex social organization in which gender played a key role in the life and death of the individuals who inhabited this region of the Iberian Peninsula. The research raises new questions about the role of women in megalithic societies and how these cultures conceived family, social, and gender relations.
It is important to note that this study has been made possible thanks to the application of innovative methodologies in the analysis of archaeological remains. The researchers have used ancient DNA (aDNA) and proteomics techniques to identify the biological sex of the individuals buried in Panoría.
In particular, the analysis of the protein amelogenin, present in dental enamel, has been key to accurately determining the sex of the human remains, something that is not always possible through the simple analysis of bones. These techniques have allowed for a detailed and unprecedented demographic profile of the population buried in this necropolis.
SOURCES
Marta, DZ.B., Gonzalo, A.J., Margarita, S.R. et al. Female sex bias in Iberian megalithic societies through bioarchaeology, aDNA and proteomics. Sci Rep 14, 21818 (2024). doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-72148-x
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