> There were 6451 men and 6936 women followed for a median of 3.0 years. During this time there were 140 incident limb fractures in men and 391 in women.
Whereas OP's archaeological study had:
> Fractures were more prevalent in males (40%, n = 57/143) than females (26%, n = 25/95).
Age, maybe? Primary cause for fractures nowadays is osteoporosis, which AFAIK is more serious to women after menopause. Primary cause historically was accidents, with the opposite distribution.
Sport? I mean almost all the people I know had a broken bone or joint issue because of sport and then you have domestic accident.
For instance in Switzerland each year you have 550k non-professional accident (declared one to your employer) for 8.5M inhabitants. (Ref: SUVA annual report but only available in GE and FR)
Theory time - it could be due to reduced natural Vitamin D from lower sun exposure, a mostly sedentary life, combined with less life long physical labor (especially for women, who are severely under-represented in construction and heavy industry, which is about the only places you'd get that kind of exercise in modern society).
Lifting weight helps bones get stronger, and Vitamin D is an essential nutrient in proper bone building.
100 years ago even, most people lived and worked on farms in the US (and many other places), now it's single digit percentages - and many of them spend it driving vehicles and similar less physical labor.
Because women have dramatically higher fracture rates due to osteoporosis (and lower bone mineral density in general) [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11063899/], the only known way (outside of some, last I heard, unproven clinical vibration treatments) to get stronger bones is to lift heavy things while having proper nutrition, and about the only occupational exposure you're going to get to lifting heavy things on a regular basis is those industries?
There is also a similar visible skew in the power lifting, olympic lifting, or weight lifting communities for those into it recreationally.
It used to be we all spent more time lifting heavy things. However, post WW2 that has rapidly declined.
So one way to reduce or reverse this is if we ALL lifted heavy things more often. From a risk reduction perspective, that seems to be especially valuable for women?
> So one way to reduce or reverse this is if we ALL lifted heavy things more often. From a risk reduction perspective, that seems to be especially valuable for women?
Depends; women might be much more prone to injury from lifting heavy things.
A lot of women I’ve lifted with were proportionately stronger than most men I’ve lifted with, injured less often, and more capable of lifting heavy things than I was. The person who taught me to deadlift was a ~140lb woman who could pull 330lb off the floor with her baby strapped to her. She was exceptional, but anecdotally I’d say women can lift whatever they want without any added risk of injury over male counterparts.
You're seeing the statistical problem of "restriction of range". Weightlifting women are one of the worst possible classes to try to generalize weightlifting ability from.
That, and like many cancers, just a larger number of people living long enough to fall victim to it. Women developing what are usually postmenopausal issues more or less requires living to and through menopause. (Yes, old people got to be nearly as old as they do now, but getting to be old was much less of a sure thing.)
You'd have to compare across a lot more fine-grained than medieval vs modern (which, in a historical sense, covers the Renaissance through to, well, now).
* It's only the last couple of hundred years that a significant body of people doing work that does not have a large physical component - bone density is heavily influenced by stressing the bones regularly through exercise.
* It's only the last hundred years that childbirth-related mortality for women has plummeted. A lot of women would die in childbirth. Early industrial revolution era saw some parts of Europe have 20-25% of women die of childbirth. Now it's an extraordinary event.
* Following from that, menopause dramatically reduces bone density for women; one reason HRT was such a popular thing in the med-to-late 20th century was that it was seen as a panacea for removing the worst effects of menopause. Unfortunately it creates a lot of issues, as well.
* Diets change dramatically. Medieval people ate (generally) much less meat and sugar, but a lot of fresh (when in season) vegetables, some fruit, and a lot of grains. Early industrial food quality plummets as people move to urban areas without the ability to grow their own food. Rickets are a huge, widespread plague on urban poor (places like Glascow had rickets endemic well into the mid 20th century) for most of the modern era.
That's just wopk and diet. Consider that the averge medieval person walked everywhere, early moderns likewise, and only from the 19th century onwards did rail, cars, and so on see people getting about without considerable exercise being involved.
> Men and women aged 50-79 years were recruited from population registers in 31 European centers.
They followed older people for 3 years. It is well-known that menopause causes osteoporosis, which makes women more at risk of bone fractures in older age. And in fact this is a study on osteoporosis...
If I'm reading this right, fractures are actually more prevalent these days?
There isn't enough information to be sure - we need to know more about the life expectancy of the medieval subjects and the likelihood of multiple fractures. Eyeballing it suggests yes, but within a factor of 2 either way.
Note though that the modern study involved older adults (50-79) who I would guess are more likely to get fractures: osteoporosis and weakened joints outweigh the increased risk from physical activity of younger people.
I find it difficult to compare these two sets of figures considering you're looking for fractures at any point in life on the skeletons, and for the study, the people were only followed for a median of 3 years (no need to say 3.0 for median).
And while they were apparently counting fractures that had healed, I assume that's an imperfect exercise for relatively minor, clean fractures from many years prior.
I assume a pretty good portion of today's population gets a fracture on a limb at some point in their lives.
I don’t think it’s to do with protecting women. Males die more and from all sorts of things, even before birth and as infants.
In terms of violent death, there is plenty that is unrelated to protecting women.
“Men's higher unintentional injury, suicide, and homicide mortality rates are observed in all age groups in low-, middle-, and high-income countries. The sole exception is for homicide of children under the age of 15 years in low- and high-income countries, where the rates for girls are similar to or higher than those for boys.”
I’m not sure how you would record whether a death was related to protecting a woman?
In my mind, things like fighting in war, working high-risk jobs, etc, all fall under protecting reproductive resources through history.
Things like suffocation, drowning, and fire are a bit harder to understand... but I believe they are derived from a high-risk mentality that men have gained as a result of this protector status.
Ignoring the radical changes that we've seen in the last 50 years, if we sent women to war, we wouldn't have any children. Any nation that did that was wiped off the face of the earth rather quickly.
> if we sent women to war, we wouldn't have any children. Any nation that did that was wiped off the face of the earth rather quickly.
If gender rolls were reversed wouldn’t be many examples where the death toll was high enough for this to occur.
In Britain in the 1921 census there were 1,209 single women aged 25 to 29 for every 1,000 men. In 1931 50% were still single, and 35% of them did not marry while still able to bear children.
After the war there were about 40% fewer single French men for every unmarried woman, compared to before.
Devastating loses but nowhere near enough to threaten the existence of a country.
Post WW2 Germany and Russia would also be grim examples. It is of note that the 20th century was the first time that deaths from actual enemy action exceeded deaths from disease during war.
> Devastating loses but nowhere near enough to threaten the existence of a country
After WW1 the average height of a french soldier dropped by an inch or two (don't remember the exact value). This was attributed to the slaughter of the fit men. It also became fashionable to marry old men and foreigners.
I know in Germany after both wars there was the same effect on marriages, but I don't know about the height.
In Islamic societies, men having multiple wives was quite rare, with the vast majority of marriages being monogamous.
It wasn't driven by having less men. It was driven by the upper class wanting more sex.
It also turned out to be disastrous for society, and most of the Islamic world has outlawed or severly restricted the practice as it leads to huge social problems.
The fact is that war has never been a large driver of casualties in these societies, outside of WW1 and WW2 which are the two exceptions and really don't prove your point. Wars were never fought to protect women, and most men died of disease and accidents, not war.
Polygyny was not restricted to Islamic societies though, and was a common occurence accross many societies. It was always restricted to a limited amount of men of course, as only the most successful/powerful/whatever could afford it.
It does have heavy social consequences, but those might or might not be an issue for a given society, as some were quite successful (ie surviving for a long time, no moral judgement here).
People do not fight for the protection of reproductive resources. The peaceful way birth rates fell around the world these days is proof of that.
People fought protecting material resources. Reproductive resources were only useful insofar as they help you produce more subordinates to generate more material resources. In feudalism this meant that reproductive resources were very important, but in slavery and capitalism it isn't really the case.
Given the realities of military engagements in Feudal Europe - and the rather small army sizes - its not true that sending women to war would cause a fatal decrease in the birth rate, at all.
> People do not fight for the protection of reproductive resources. The peaceful way birth rates fell around the world these days is proof of that.
People have fought for a number of reasons, material resources AND reproductive resources are usually key to those. Historically, raiding for woman and resources has been a constant. A big tribe is a safe tribe, more women is key. Even in modern times, you can see the pressure in expensionist/aggressive societies for women to have more children.
Again, I certainly agree. Reproductive resources are, however, ultimately a means to an end. Material resources and power are the driving force.
Fighting for reproductive resources is, however, an outmoded concern. While some states are fighting falling birthrates, none have went to war to acquire more women in recent times. And the reason why states are pursuing population is, again, material.
What you are saying is simply wrong. Females participate in war in many species, including humans and lions. Female lions will often defend their pride to prevent the attacking lions from killing their cubs, and similarly in humans women often fight in defensive wars.
Evolutionary biases are also essentially irrelevant in how societies are structured. The structures of societies are very intentional and based on material reality, not mere biases.
Generally, men have mostly done the fighting, especially in wars of aggression. The reasons for these are material, as men are often better at fighting. It's not to protect women. When it's useful and makes sense for women to fight, then women fight.
>Evolutionary biases are also essentially irrelevant in how societies are structured. The structures of societies are very intentional and based on material reality, not mere biases.
Evolutionary biases are fundamentally relevant to the way society is structured. Historically more violent behavior in males has always been very adaptive as the rewards are far greater.
Evolutionary biases simply aren't relevant structurally. While men do exhibit more violent behaviour, it's been since the invention of the state that violence became a tool and not a concern. The vast majority of violence has for a long time been organized, calculated state or political violence, not instinct-driven agression. The latter still exists, but pales in comparison.
Put another way, if you took almost any society today and made everyone women, you would not see a major decrease in violence, as the vast majority of violence done serves structural and material reasons.
While violence is not always a tool, it is an evolutionary strategy. Before the advent of the state, it was already a tool, or could be at least. It, and other adaptive behaviors still hold some sway on us, and our societies are still shaped by them. We've become more complex, and cultural evolution influences as well, but you cannot cross this a defunct relic of our history.
The miniseries Spartacus (recommended!) decided to pit women gladiators against male ones. Both the men and women were obviously highly fit and ripped. Try as they might, the filmmakers simply couldn't make it look like a fair fight.
This is indeed true. That's why women in combat roles historically did not engage in such roles. Instead, women often manned defences, were light archers, and so on.
Women have been in support and combat positions in war since antiquity. Women buried with weapons were found in Kazakhstan in antiquity, otherwise quite a few Chinese armies had women in infantry positions (most often manning defences). See : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_warfare
This generally doesn't happen unless either the society is quite rich but lacks strong men, or cases of emergency, or if there is surplus of land and food, because raising armies is very costly, and as a result it doesn't make sense not to send the strongest fighters possible as it is expensive to outfit them and to maintain production at home.
Nowadays, women are proving extremely competent as fighter pilots as their bodies are better at withstanding G-Forces, but in classical infantry where there is a large strength requirement again it doesn't make much sense.
What about the men who were living dangerously by assaulting women? What do you think men were protecting women from? If you're going to talk about war, you have to talk about offense as well as defense, and some significant percentage of warriors were injured/killed while attacking, not defending, and then the survivors went on to rape and pillage. Some of these men were taking resources, not protecting them. For some men to be "protectors" means others are aggressors. If men lead more dangerous lives due to war and violence, you've got to consider how much of that danger they created themselves.
"Protection" that involves attacking others first is pretty questionable from a moral and practical standpoint. "No first strike" policies for nuclear weapons, for instance, would go a long way to making the world safer.
A lot of those things would actually reduce your chance of getting fractures from low bone density, along with the increased risk of fractures from accidents.
Not trying to be condescending to women, but we are a sexually dimorphic species due to the heavy costs that women bear in reproduction (ie they are unable to fight for 9 months, and they can only reproduce ~annually, whereas a man can reproduce ~daily)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12111017/
> There were 6451 men and 6936 women followed for a median of 3.0 years. During this time there were 140 incident limb fractures in men and 391 in women.
Whereas OP's archaeological study had:
> Fractures were more prevalent in males (40%, n = 57/143) than females (26%, n = 25/95).