A study published in PLOS One on September 10, 2025, demonstrated that women and children were just as likely as men to be buried with stone tools at the Zvejnieki cemetery in northern Latvia, challenging long-held assumptions about gender roles in Stone Age communities. Women were at least as likely, and sometimes more likely, than men to be interred with these objects.
“Our findings overturn the old stereotype of ‘Man the Hunter,’ which has been a dominant theme in Stone Age studies, and which has even sometimes influenced the way the sex of certain infants was determined - simply because they had received lithic tools,” said Aimée Little of the University of York’s archaeology department, according to Science Daily. Little led the Stone Dead Project, which examined tools that earlier scholarship often dismissed as purely utilitarian.
The Zvejnieki cemetery, on the shores of Lake Burtnieki in northern Latvia, is one of Europe’s largest Stone Age burial sites. Archaeologists recovered the remains of 330 individuals, and the community used the site from about 7500 to 2500 BCE, offering a window into prehistoric beliefs and funerary practices.
Researchers cataloged blades, flint flakes, knives, scrapers, and other chipped stone tools, and used microscopy in Riga to study how the objects were made and used. More than half showed no use-wear and appeared to be newly made for burial. Some were deliberately broken before interment, indicating their role in funerary rites, while others bore traces of everyday activities such as animal processing, woodworking, leather working, and cutting. Young children and elderly people were the age groups most often buried with stone artifacts. “This research demonstrates that we cannot make these gendered assumptions and that lithic grave goods played an important role in the mourning rituals of children and women, as well as men,” said Anđa Petrović of the University of Belgrade, according to Popular Science.
Across the eastern Baltic, many Stone Age burials contained broken tools, pointing to a shared ritual tradition in which tools served as symbolic objects rather than only as implements of work. The publication also noted a chronological turning point at Zvejnieki: older graves from the 6th–5th millennia BCE in the northwestern sector contained few or no lithic tools, while from the 4th millennium BCE the southeastern sector saw an increase in tools alongside more elaborate rites such as clay masks, collective burials, and heavier use of ochre. Tools stained with ochre and implements used to work the clay formed part of the last rites.
Earlier research at Zvejnieki focused on ornaments made from teeth, bone, and amber as markers of social identity, and often relegated chipped stone tools to a utilitarian category. The new analyses indicated that these objects played a deeper role in funerary rituals dating back at least five millennia.
Individual burials illustrated the pattern. About 6,000 years ago, a young woman in grave 211 was laid to rest with a stone ax, 28 flint flakes, 15 blades, and a stone scraper - 45 stone objects in total. A girl from grave 207 was placed at the center of a funerary arrangement that included the highest number of bifacial points at the site (seven points), additional tools (16 flakes, six scrapers), and a votive deposit of bones, teeth, tusks, and amber.
Modern discovery of the site began in 1964, when workers at a gravel quarry on the lake’s northern shore uncovered a human skull. The quarry closed and archaeologists excavated from 1964 to 1978, followed by another large campaign from 2005 to 2009.
The Stone Dead Project “highlights how much more there is to learn about the lives - and deaths - of Europe’s earliest communities, and why even the seemingly simplest objects can unlock insights about our shared human past and how people responded to death,” said Little.
Written with the help of a news-analysis system.