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Female 'Amazon' warrior buried 2,500 years ago in Altai Mountains was... male By The Siberian Times reporter 01 December 2015 New DNA findings alter the sex of one of most famous recent Siberian archeological finds of human remains. Archeologists and anthropologists believed she was not only female - and a pig-tailed teenager - but a member of an elite corps of warriors within the Pazyryk culture. Picture: Marcel Nyffenegger, Natalia Polosmak A Swiss taxidermy expert brought 'her' to life, recreating the 'virgin' warrior's looks from facial bones, and some observers commented on her distinctly masculine appearance. Yet archeologists and anthropologists believed she...

A 2,500-year-old predecessor of DC Comics’ Wonder Woman super heroine has emerged on a vase painting kept at a small American museum. Drawn on a white-ground pyxis (a lidded cylindrical box that was used for cosmetics, jewelry, or ointments) the image shows an Amazon on horseback in a battle against a Greek warrior. Much like the fictional warrior princess of the Amazons, the horsewoman is twirling a lasso. “It is the only ancient artistic image of an Amazon using a lariat in battle,” Adrienne Mayor, a research scholar at Stanford University’s departments of classics and history of science, told Discovery...

Archaeology shows that these fierce women also smoked pot, got tattoos, killed—and loved—men. The Amazons got a bum rap in antiquity. They wore trousers. They smoked pot, covered their skin with tattoos, rode horses, and fought as hard as the guys. Legends sprang up like weeds. They cut off their breasts to fire their bows better! They mutilated or killed their boy children! Modern (mostly male) scholars continued the confabulations. The Amazons were hard-core feminists. Man haters. Delinquent mothers. Lesbians. Drawing on a wealth of textual, artistic, and archaeological evidence, Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons, dispels these myths and...

Excavations of bronze age burial sites have uncovered battle-scarred female archers, leading some archaeologists to posit that Amazons, the famed female warriors of Greek legend who are largely believed to be mythical, may have really existed. In Greek mythology, the Amazons were warrior women living northeast of ancient Greece during the late Bronze Age, between approximately 1900 and 1200 BC. The source of the Amazonian myths is Classical Greek literature in which they were first mentioned by Homer. As one of his 12 labors, Hercules has to get hold of the magic girdle of the Amazonian queen Hippolyte, and Achilles...