These 'third-gender' people, said Arnold, were sometimes even accorded special spiritual or shaman status in their societies. Men in many cultures throughout history have occupied a sort of liminal space between the two sexes: They would dress and act like women, but that behavior would have no bearing on their sexual orientation or who they slept with. Some Native American tribes, for example, have room for as many as seven different genders. She pointed to examples of 'gender transformers' across most ancient societies.
Homosexuality, as Westerners think of it today, comes with a lot of added societal baggage that wouldn't resonate at all with prehistoric man, Arnold said. They were 'sedentary agriculturalists' - farmers. Some initial media reports suggested that the remains belonged to a 'caveman.' But by the Copper Age, 5000 years ago, Europeans weren't cavedwellers at all, said Arnold.
'But what made this individual different? Was it their sexual orientation? That's a little tricky.' They're making a statement by not putting any of these male identity markers in the grave,' Bettina Arnold, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told. Vesinova concluded that the grave represents 'one of the earliest cases of what could be described as a 'transsexual' or 'third gender grave' in the Czech Republic.'
