Gendered burial practices of early Bronze Age children align with peptide-based sex identification: A case study from Franzhausen I, Austria

Highlights

• Sex of prehistoric children identified via sex-specific peptides in tooth enamel.

• Male and female subadults were buried as men or women mirroring adult burials.

• Children were classified as male or female before they matured and learned gender.

• Sidedness of the body was more likely to match biological sex than were other signals.

• Exceptions to the gender rule appear to be culturally and socially significant.

Abstract

Gendered burial practices that differentiate between men and women by the way the body was placed were used over large parts of Central Europe in the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age (c. 2900–1600 BC). Until recently, it was unknown if the sex-based differentiation of bodies was extended to children, and if the biological sex of the children matched the classification as men and women placed on the left/right side in the opposite orientation.

We applied nanoflow liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (nanoLC-MS/MS) to identify sex-specific peptides in human tooth enamel in 75 children under 12 years at death buried at one of the largest Early Bronze Age cemeteries in Europe, Franzhausen I, Austria, 70 of which produced reliable results.

The study confirmed that the sex of the children corresponds to the gendered body position in 98.4% of cases. For burials in which the gendered sidedness and orientation are not internally consistent with the male or female pattern, we found that the sidedness of the body corresponds to the sex of the children rather than the orientation.