Fossilized teeth of early human ancestors bear signs that females left their families when they came of age, whereas males stayed close to home.Cool use of trace elements...
A chemical analysis of australopithecine fossils ranging between roughly 1.8 million and 2.2 million years old from two South African caves finds that teeth thought to belong to females are more likely to have incorporated minerals from a distant region during formation than those from males.
"What that's telling us is that the females grew up somewhere else and they died in the caves," says Julia Lee-Thorp, an archaeological scientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and a co-author on the study, published today in Nature1. "It's a very small clue, but it's something that is at least hard evidence for what we really didn't have before."...
Note that this is different than what another research group found for modern human hunter gatherers, with whom the two sexes appear to be equally likely to break off into a different social group.
This also tends to play to the old stereotype of the caveman clubbing the cave woman over the head and taking her off to join his band...
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