This story is from September, but I love it so much I am posting it anyway.
The New York Post posted an article on September 7 about a Viking skeleton that has been discovered.
The article reports:
The remains of a powerful Viking — long thought to be a man — was in fact a real-life Xena Warrior Princess, a study released Friday reveals.
The lady war boss was buried in the mid-10th century along with deadly weapons and two horses, leading archaeologists and historians to assume she was a man, according to the findings published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Wrong.
“It’s actually a woman, somewhere over the age of 30 and fairly tall, too, measuring around [5 feet 6 inches] tall,” archaeologist Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson of Uppsala University, who conducted the study, told The Local.
And she was likely in charge.
The article concludes:
The Viking grave was first found and excavated by Swedish archaeologist Hjalmar Stolpe in the late 1800s.
But a few years ago, osteologist Anna Kjellström of Stockholm University noticed its skeleton had fine cheekbones and feminine hip bones, researches said.
They conducted DNA analysis and confirmed it was a female.
“This image of the male warrior in a patriarchal society was reinforced by research traditions and contemporary preconceptions. Hence, the biological sex of the individual was taken for granted,” Hedenstierna-Jonson and other researchers wrote in the report.
The research was led by the Stockholm and Uppsala universities.
I love this.