Regardless of their chronology, the unbalanced sex ratio is a key feature of the different phases of funerary activity that are concentrated in four peaks of ritual intensity dated in the thirty-fourth, twenty-ninth, twenty-fifth and twenty-first centuries.

Furthermore, sex bias can be found in all tombs and different age categories. The overrepresentation of females can thus be considered a temporally persistent social pattern characteristic of the social groups that buried their dead in the different Panoría dolmens.

If sex bias is a social pattern, what are the social reasons for this over-representation of females in funerary rituals?

Why is the sex bias so persistent in the megalithic societies at Panoría?

The sex bias found at Panoría would indicate an emphasis on selecting and depositing females.

This suggests that the mortuary practices of the Panoría necropolis could have been mainly based on matrilineal descent.

It seems that funerary depositions were selective, prioritising females to be buried in the megalithic tombs. It is possible that lineage daughters stayed with the kin group while sons left to join other kin groups (male exogamy).

The extreme sex bias found in non-adults at Panoría with a sex ratio of 0.16:1 (M:F) would support this possibility. However, the hypothesis of matrilineal descendent, where females are prioritised, needs further corroboration.

Establishing the genetic relationships between individuals is paramount for testing this interpretive proposal as it has been proved at major megalithic sites in Ireland and Britain.

The overrepresentation of females among the Panoría population is probably indicatesa female-centred social structure, in which sex and/or gender would have influenced funerary rites and cultural traditions.