In Panoria, in the province of Granada in Spain lies a rock necropolis that is truly ancient. At 5,600 years old, it was constructed well before the Egyptians got started with their pyramids.
There are many questions still unanswered about the complex, the people who built it and their society, but now we have one more question to add to the pile: why are there so many women?
Recent research by a team led by groups from the University of Tübingen and the University of Granada has revealed that twice as many women as men were buried at the site. For children the disparity is even more pronounced, with only one male child entombed for every ten girls.
The findings, published via Researchgate, suggests the necropolis is very different from other contemporary sites in the region. Such places typically favor male burials, so what makes this place different?
The research team are hesitant to draw conclusions from the data at this point, but they do tentatively offer several suggestions. This could simply be an outlier, possibly a family or interrelated group who lived in the area and just happened to be mainly female.
The sample size might allow for this, with only 44 individuals recovered. However other aspects of the site suggest otherwise: individual tombs vary, some being richer and some poorer, but the disparity in the sex of the occupants seems to remain consistent regardless of social status.
This leaves the intriguing possibility that there may have been a matriarchal society in Spain during the last moments of the Iberian Neolithic. It is believed that further research into the necropolis and its surrounding area may reveal further traces of this society, and perhaps offer an insight into life in this female-led tribe who lived and died more than five millennia ago.
Header Image: The Panoria necropolis contains far more women than men. Source: Female sex bias in Iberian megalithic societies through bioarchaeology, aDNA and proteomics.
