By the time he reached adulthood, a young man later buried on the shore of a lake in northern Latvia had already had his right arm remade from the inside. Years of hurling one-handed weapons — spears, arrows, or harpoons — had packed extra bone around the shaft until it grew rounder and stronger than the arm of a man who spent his days pulling fishing nets from the water.
Thousands of years later, a team of researchers noticed that those upper-arm bones fell into two groups. People buried with pendants carved from animal teeth had arms shaped one way, and people buried without pendants had arms shaped another. The split also lined up with what each group had eaten in life.
That pattern is explained in a new study published in Science Advances. A team analyzed the long bones (limb bones such as the upper-arm bone and thigh bone) of people buried at Zvejnieki, a hunter-fisher-gatherer cemetery on the shore of Lake Burtnieks in northern Latvia that was used between the seventh and fourth millennia B.C.E., before farming reached the region. The bones point to these foragers dividing labor into specialized roles, which may have been reflected in how they buried their dead.
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Animal Tooth Pendants at Zvejnieki Show Signs of Specialized Hunter-Gatherer Labor
Illustration of the male and child burial site with elk teeth and elk tooth pendant.
(Image Credit: B. Vaska. Collection number VI 93, Institute of Latvian History, Faculty of Humanities, University of Latvia)
Bone is living tissue that rebuilds itself in response to strain, thickening where it is loaded hardest and thinning where it is not. By measuring the cross-section of a long bone, researchers can read traces of the kinds of movement an arm or leg repeated over a lifetime.
The leg bones showed that people across the cemetery shared a similar way of moving through the landscape. Their femurs were less robust and more rounded than those of many earlier European hunter-gatherers, a sign that they ranged less widely and lived on flat terrain rich in fish and game close to home.
The upper-arm bones, however, showed that men buried with pendants had a reinforced, rounded right arm, the kind that can develop from repetitive one-handed throwing, a signature also seen in the dominant arms of baseball pitchers and cricket bowlers. Men buried without pendants had both arms strengthened front-to-back instead, consistent with the steady flexing and pulling involved in net fishing.
The women showed a fainter version of the same divide, though the female sample was very small. Those buried with pendants had arm shapes consistent with hide processing, an interpretation supported by worn axes found in some pendant graves.
Bones Connect Ancient Diets to Daily Work
Earlier chemical analysis of these same skeletons had already shown that people buried with pendants ate more meat from land animals, while those without pendants ate more freshwater fish, and that the difference began early in life. The bones now supply the missing half of the picture — the physical labor behind those diets.
Together, the evidence points to two specialized ways of life, one oriented toward hunting and processing land mammals, the other toward the lake. The tooth pendants, the authors argue, may have helped mark or preserve those identities in the grave.
Specialized Roles Came Before Farming
Elk teeth from burial 122
(Image Credit: A. Macāne)
The finding challenges the idea that hunter-gatherers lived in simple, undifferentiated groups and that specialized roles only arrived with agriculture. At Zvejnieki, activities and identities appear to have taken shape thousands of years before farming reached the region.
The authors describe this pattern as independent specialization, meaning there is no sign of a managerial class controlling who did what. Instead, abundant local resources may have let families settle into durable roles and pass identities down through generations. By that reading, the so-called Neolithic revolution looks less like a sudden break and more like an expansion of social patterns some foragers had already built.
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Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from a study published in Science Advances: Biomechanical evidence for occupational specialization in Mesolithic-Neolithic hunter-gatherers from Zvejnieki, Latvia
