快猫短视频

THERE can be few myths as ingrained in our consciousness as that of the Amazons, an ancient caste of warrior women whose marksmanship struck fear into the hearts of their enemies, who chose sexual partners freely and who sacrificed their male offspring to preserve the matriarchy.

I have been musing on this while watching tensions rise on the Russia-Ukraine border. At the beginning of that conflict, in 2014, a Ukrainian biathlete and sports minister called Olena Pidhrushna was of shooting Russian-speaking civilians in eastern Ukraine. Historian Amandine Regamey recognised this image of a gun-toting woman as the latest revival of the legendary Amazon. She wore a single earring (鈥渋t is more convenient to shoot鈥�) and her shoulder was bruised from her rifle鈥檚 recoil. 鈥淭he parallel with the Amazons, who were said to cut [off] one breast to bend their bows more easily, is obvious here,鈥� .

鈥淎 part of me has always yearned for the Amazons to have existed, but I have revised my thinking in light of all this鈥�

But did the Amazons really exist? The question has been asked often, and the answer looks more confusing than ever. Legend has it that they lived alongside the semi-nomadic Scythians, who inhabited the steppe north of the Black Sea, in the first millennium BC. This region, which overlaps with the area disputed today, has yielded many royal Scythian graves, including several belonging to female warriors.

In 2017, a team led by archaeogeneticist (mDNA) profiles of the occupants of those graves. mDNA is passed down the maternal line, and half the royal women carried mDNA that could be traced to an eastern Eurasian origin, but none of the males did. Though the sample was small 鈥� only 19 individuals 鈥� the researchers suggested one possible explanation was that noblewomen who identified as Amazons sacrificed their sons.

Covid-19 and the intensifying conflict in the region put this research on hold, so the team hasn鈥檛 been able to test that idea. In the meantime, historian Julien d鈥橦uy has dealt a serious blow to the idea that the Amazons were ever flesh and blood. He used statistical tools to measure the closeness of narrative elements within versions of myths about primitive matriarchies. Such tales occur on every inhabited continent, suggesting to him that their common ancestor originated in Africa, whence it radiated outwards with the first humans to leave. The matriarchy never existed, ; men invented it to justify subjugating women because the legend usually tells that the one time women had power, they abused it.

So were Amazons real or not? Both, says archaeologist , Slovakia, who thinks the Amazon myth grew from a grain of truth. Female warriors may have existed sporadically on the steppe prior to Greek contact, but the ancient Greeks鈥� noblewomen into the lucrative business of raiding peasant villages. The economic stakes may have become so high that the women created their own identity, norms and culture 鈥� their brand, if you like. In doing so, they threatened male and other female identities to such an extent that outsiders hyped the truth into a fearsome myth that justified reprisals.

Women have adopted male roles at other times, says Taylor. For example, native American women played a critical role in the early fur trade. And today, in Albanian villages depleted of men by endemic blood feuding, you can still find , assume male roles and are buried as men.

Then there are the real female snipers of Ukraine. More than 30,000 women serve in the Ukrainian armed forces, , and since 2018 they have officially been eligible for many combat roles. Not everybody is happy about that. Last year, the authorities were lambasted for ordering female soldiers to parade in high heels. They later backed down.

A part of me has always yearned for the unconventional Amazons to have existed, but I have revised my thinking in light of all this. The myth pits the sexes against each other, when both history and biology teach us that gender and even to some extent biological sex are fluid. In his provocative book Cosmogonies, d鈥橦uy blames feminists 鈥� from archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, who postulated an ancient gynocracy in Europe, to Andrea Dworkin, who called for a female-only country called Womanland 鈥� for keeping us shackled to that myth. Throw off those shackles and we see that Amazons, if they existed, may not have been so different from us. Only then is genuine equality possible. That seems a better goal to yearn for.