Archaeologists in Mongolia have found the remains of two ancient women warriors, whose skeletal remains indicate that they were well practiced in archery and horseback riding.
These two women lived during the Xianbei period (A.D. 147 to 552), a period of political fragmentation and unrest that gave rise to the Ballad of Mulan, the researchers said.
Perhaps these women were so athletic because during the Xianbei period, "it may have been that women were needed to defend home and country alongside the men," said study researchers Christine Lee and Yahaira Gonzalez, bioarchaeologists at California State University, Los Angeles.
Lee added that many historians pin Mulan to the Xianbei period. There's a lot of research into the Ballad of Mulan, and "my research just reinforces what they've been finding," Lee told Live Science.
In particular, she looked at bone marks from muscle attachments, as larger marks indicate that the muscles were heavily used; for instance, during archery. Markers of repetitive movement on the thumb were also indicative of archery, Lee said. She also looked for trauma patterns in the spine that are common in people who ride horses.
"They were probably pretty badass," Lee said. "They're doing what the men are doing. So, you can extrapolate from that [and say] that they have some gender equality."
Any form of gender equality was momentous for that period in Asia. "In neighboring China at that time, women were secluded," Lee said. "The ideal woman was helpless and docile, while being in the north [in Mongolia], they're not."
The Mongolian culture didn't have a written language before Genghis Khan (1162 to 1227), but other cultures, including the Chinese, Koreans and Persians, wrote about the Mongolians, Lee said. By the A.D. 900s, women in Mongolia were enjoying freedoms not found in contemporary cultures; the Mongolians had queens who led armies and received emissaries from the Pope, Lee said. In addition, women were able to inherit property and decide whom they wanted to marry, she said.
"If they're already that independent by 900 A.D., my thinking was that you [can] extrapolate backward, at least a couple hundred years, because it has to come from somewhere," Lee told Live Science.
She noted that the Chinese were writing propaganda about the Mongolian women, "because they were saying that it [women having power] was a bad thing, and that's horrible and that these women have too much freedom and they're slutty and they're horrible wives."
Of the two warrior women, one was older than 50 and the other was about 20 years old. It's possible they practiced archery and rode horses because these skills were needed during the political instability that following the collapse of the Han Dynasty in China in A.D. 220, Lee said.
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Originally published on Live Science.
