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A Viking-age grave in Birka, Sweden, contained all the trappings of a warrior:
“The grave goods include a sword, an axe, a spear, armour-piercing arrows, a battle knife, two shields, and two horses, one mare and one stallion; thus, the complete equipment of a professional warrior. Furthermore, a full set of gaming pieces indicates knowledge of tactics and strategy, stressing the buried individual's role as a high-ranking officer.”
Based on the assemblage of grave goods, archeologists initially assumed the body in the grave was that of a man.
It wasn’t.
Genomic studies revealed that the person in the grave did not have a Y-chromosome.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23308
9,000 years ago in Peru, another young woman was buried with the tools of a big game hunter. Once archeologists realized the grave was not a man’s, they tested other known graves of big game hunters and found that, of the 27 sets of remains that could be biologically sexed, 11 were female and 16 male.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/science/ancient-female-hunter.html
We have, for a long time, made a lot of assumptions about the past and the ways in which men and women inhabited those societies.
The past is so much more complex and fantastic than we realize.
In Russia, four women warriors were buried together 2,500 years ago. Women warriors were common among the Scythian people; one was just 12 or 13 years old but may have been an accomplished rider and archer.
In medieval Finland, a person was buried with rich grave goods, suggesting elite status. They were buried wearing female-coded clothing but with a male-coded sword, confusing archeologists for years.
Turns out this person had Klinefelter Syndrome and may have presented as non-binary or intersex.
The oldest known, almost-complete skeleton of a modern human in Britain, found in Cheddar Gorge and thus known as Cheddar Man, belonged to a member of the West European Hunter Gatherer population.
Genomic studies indicate he, like his kin, had light eyes and dark skin.
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/cheddar-man-mesolithic-britain-blue-eyed-boy.html
There’s a family living in Cheddar that’s directly descended from him, about 9,000 years later.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/ancient-face-cheddar-man-reconstructed-dna-spd
Like the Cheddar Man above, this Neolithic Scandinavian woman was also had dark skin. We know this because scientists were able to decode her genome from a wad of birch tar she had chewed like gum and spat out.