This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Karen Hopkins.

Picture a women's crew team, training 18 hours and covering 75 miles in an average week, these

athletes are pretty ripped, yet they don't hold a bicep to prehistoric female farmers.

Because a new study shows that based on upper arm strength, the Neolithic ladies leave

modern women, even elite athletes, in the dust. The work appears at the journal Science advances.

The studies researchers had previously examined the bones of prehistoric men. Because bones adapt to the load they bear, they can provide a record of the sort of activities in which an individual regularly engages.

So at the dawn of agriculture, men's leg bones were strong, like today's cross-country runners.

But by the late iron age, their leg bones look more like that of the average couch potato.

So it's kind of matched with declines in mobility as people became more sedentary through time.

Allison McIntosh, who did that work when she was an undergraduate student in archaeology at the University of Cambridge.

But we didn't see these drops to women. Their leg bone strength was consistently lower than men's. It didn't change significantly through time. So really the women just

looked quite sedentary, pretty much right from the get-go, and we didn't think that was

very, probably necessarily very accurate representation of what they had been doing.

Now it could be that prehistoric housewives sat around and lunched their way through the Neolithic,

but McIntosh thought that unlikely.

Instead she and her colleagues figured that the bones of men and women react differently under pressure.

So McIntosh, now a postdoctoral fellow with the same group, decided to look at the limbs of some ladies.

She recruited 18 championship rowers, 11 soccer players, 17 runners,

and 37 somewhat less sporty undergrads.

And she scanned their upper arms and lower legs.

What she found is that the leg bone strength of prehistoric women was as variable as that of

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