Serenella A. Sukno

A year ago @Nature published a paper on the Neolithic Fujia cemetery in China. It became one of the strongest archaeogenetic arguments for ancient matrilineality. So what has appeared since then? Fujia dates to about 2750 to 2500 BCE. Researchers studied DNA from 60 people buried in two cemeteries. Each cemetery almost perfectly matched a separate maternal line. In the northern cemetery everyone had the mitochondrial haplogroup M8a3. In the southern cemetery almost everyone had D5b1b. At the same time the male Y chromosome lines were diverse. In other words people seem to have been buried not by paternal descent but by maternal belonging. Radiocarbon dates suggest that this system lasted for about 250 years or at least ten generations. Over the past year many new papers on ancient DNA and social organization have appeared. But most of them add to the picture of patrilineality. Male lines. Female exogamy. Status passed through the father’s line. Still there is one important new example. Çatalhöyük in Anatolia. In a 2025 study researchers analyzed 131 genomes from 35 houses in this Neolithic settlement. They did not find clans like at Fujia. But they did find a stable role for maternal lines inside houses. Daughters probably stayed connected to the house more often. Adult sons may have left. Female child burials also received more grave goods. At the moment it seems that matrilineality really did exist in the ancient past. And now we can see it not only through ethnography but also through DNA. But it does not look like a universal stage of social development. It looks more like a rare local and very interesting alternative to much more common patrilineal models. nature.com/articles/s41586-0… science.org/doi/10.1126/scie… #aDNA #matrilineality #patrilineality #pedigree