Amazon Myth or Lore?

Women warriors whom we might call Amazons did exist, but were they the legendary equestrian band of man-hating archers with partial mastectomies? Were they the same as the Amazons Herodotus describes? Kathy Sawyer, in Were Amazons More than Myths?, an article from the July 31, 1997 Salt Lake Tribune, suggests "the notion of such women ... [who] replenished their numbers by mating with men from other tribes, keeping the daughters and killing male infants ... sprang from ... an imaginative impulse in the male-dominated Greek society ...." But Germanic tribes had women warriors and Mongol families accompanied the armies of Genghis Khan, so the presence of women warriors was well attested even before Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball "spent five years excavating more than 150 burial mounds of 5th century B.C. nomads near Pokrovka, Russia."