In 2017, a paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology reported on a surprising genetic analysis. A person buried at the ancient Viking site of Birka, alongside weapons and other equipment befitting a male Viking warrior, had no Y chromosome. She was a biological woman.
Archaeologists had read about such warriors in ancient poetry, but female fighters “have generally been dismissed as mythological phenomena,” the paper says.
The Birka woman and other discoveries have challenged the idea that ancient women exclusively spent their time rearing children and gathering plants and did not hunt and fight. More evidence came from a 2020 literature review that concluded women accounted for up to 50 percent of prehistoric big game hunters in the Americas.
