Fingerprints show women, teens among makers of 2,200-year-old Terracotta Warriors, not just men's work: study

Women and teenagers helped build China's 2,200-year-old Terracotta Warriors, according to a new study of fingerprints preserved in the clay warriors - the first quantitative biological evidence that the massive project was not carried out by adult men alone, researchers said.

Researchers from the Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum and Shandong University examined 79 distinct fingerprints on 23 terracotta figures. Using a Bayesian mixture model - a statistical method that estimates the overall makeup of a group from imperfect individual clues rather than identifying any single person - they concluded that about 45 percent of the prints likely came from adult men, 32.7 percent from adult women, and 22.3 percent from people under age 15, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

China's Terracotta Warriors are a 2,200-year-old collection of life-sized clay sculptures that form part of the mausoleum of the first Qin emperor - Qinshihuang.

The finding, published on international journal, challenged a long-standing assumption that the standardized, large-scale production of the life-size clay figures was exclusively men's work.

This is the first time that the academic community has biological evidence at the group level showing that women and juveniles may have taken part in shaping, moving, or assembling the figures, the researchers noted.

Most of the 79 fingerprints appear on separately molded parts such as heads, arms, and armor plates: 73 were surface impressions left while the clay was still soft, while six were raised prints formed when artisans pressed on decorative elements such as armor rivets or belts. Their locations match the known production method of molding components separately and then assembling them - like a giant, ancient version of modular manufacturing.

The adult male fingerprints clustered around age 20; the adult female prints also centered on young adulthood. The share of juvenile prints aligns with historical references to apprentices working alongside master craftsmen in the Qin Dynasty (221BC-206BC) period.

Researchers also noted that the proportions are statistical estimates for the sample as a whole, not a census of individual artisans.

Still, the study provides a new foundation for larger fingerprint surveys in other pits and offers a rare direct glimpse into the human hands - male, female, and young - that created one of the ancient world's most famous archaeological wonders, according to Xinhua.