4,000-year-old burial of elite woman with ostrich fan reveals world's oldest known evidence of head straps | Live Science

https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/4-000-year-old-burial-of-elite-woman-with-ostrich-fan-reveals-worlds-oldest-known-evidence-of-head-straps

4,000-year-old burial of elite woman with ostrich fan reveals world's oldest known evidence of head straps

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By Owen Jarus published 2 days ago

Around 4,000 years ago, women in Nubia were using tumplines, a form of head strap, to carry around goods and young children.

A plaster cast of a relief that depicts a military expedition launched by Ramesses II about 3,300 years ago. A Nubian woman can be seen with a head strap carrying a child in a basket. (Image credit: World History Archive via Alamy Stock Photo)

Marks on 4,000-year-old skeletons reveal that Bronze Age women in Nubia were carrying goods and young children on their heads using tumplines, a type of head strap that can hold a basket, a new study finds. The discovery reveals the oldest known use of head straps in the world.

Researchers made the finding in Sudan after analzying the remains of 30 people (14 females and 16 males) buried in a Nubian Bronze Age cemetery. One, an elite woman who was around 50 years old when she died, had the clearest marks indicative of head straps.

This is the "first clear evidence that women were using head straps — tumplines — to carry loads as early as the Bronze Age," study lead author Jared Carballo-Pérez, a researcher of bioarchaeology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, told Live Science in an email.

Carballo-Pérez and his colleagues investigated at the archaeological site of Abu Fatima which consists of a cemetery that is located by the third cataract of the Nile River, in what was once the ancient kingdom of Kush.

After analyzing the 30 people in the Abu Fatima cemetery, the team found that women tended to have more wear on their head and neck areas than the male skeletons did, indicating that the women were bearing loads with head straps.

"Women exhibited specific degenerative changes in the cervical vertebrae and skull areas associated with prolonged use of tumplines that transfer weight from the forehead to the upper back," the team wrote in a statement.

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