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*Also interesting are the so-called "Amazons" of the Russian steppes. The women were warriors, the men tended home and hearth. For years, Russian anthroplogists did not realize this. They just saw skeletons buried with weapons and armor, and assumed they were male. Closer examination revealed the truth: the warriors were women. And it was not a ceremonial thing. One skeleton of a girl about 14 years old showed several healed injuries consistence with battle wounds, and the kind of skeletal changes that come with riding a horse and wielding weapons from a young age. Her armor and weapons, buried with her, were clearly used. A nearby male skeleton was found buried with a baby in its arms. His grave goods contained no weapons; instead, he was buried with some cooking pots. This pattern persisted for hundreds of years; some speculate that these people were the Amazons of Greek myth.*

That's a load of speculation.

A bit too much speculation to buy into as 100% fact.

Digging up a few graves proves nothing.

If you've never seen it, you should check out a really funny book entitled Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay. It's basically a parody of the many assumptions that are routinely made by archaeologists based upon scant evidence.

It's quite easy for archaeologists to make such assumptions. After all, no one truly "in the know" is alive today to dispute their conclusions.

And once again -- one's own bias tends to play a role in interpeting things. One always needs to recognize that fact.

While gender identity may be hard-wired from birth, gender roles are not. Every society has different roles for men and women, but there's nothing men always do, and women always do.

One can always come up with an exception here or there.......but such examples are in extremely tiny minorities. And the undue emphasis placed upon such extremely rare examples over the other 99.99% of examples is nothing more than an attempt to create an invalid conclusion.

Many present-day South American Indian tribal men hunt -- and that's about it. They tend to spend the rest of their time doing little to nothing -- while the women till the fields, cook, clean, take care of the children -- and pretty much do around 90% to 95% of the work.

If one wished to find an example of nearly useless males, one need look no further. Not that others can't be found, of course. A bit closer to home.

All in all, traditional male roles and traditional female roles are quite well defined. And not merely in Western cultures.

Grasp at the few rare contrary examples if you like. But the 99.99% on the other side of the scale tends to overbalance them by a sizable margin.

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