Patriarchy In Europe

An new paper takes ancient DNA, radiocarbon dates, and strontium measurements (which are used to determine if people were native to a locale or not) in the context of their burials, from a large sample of about 90 subjects for which this was recoverable, from Neolithic cemetery near modern day Paris (from ca. 4700 BCE to 4300 BCE). 

The paper is Maïté Rivollat, et al., "Extensive pedigrees reveal the social organization of a Neolithic community" Nature (2023) (hat tip to Bernard's blog).

The paper finds that almost everyone in this Neolithic cemetery was a member of one of two families (also grouped by location) that were themselves third or fourth cousins in seven generations of burials spanning a century. The patriarch of the larger family's remains and his wife's remains were relocated to the site, but all of the other bodies, starting in the next generation after him, were buried there in the first place. 

The paper's findings reaffirm a basic fact about the social organization of the first farmers of Europe: The first farmers of Europe were patriarchal and patrilocal.

In other words, adult men lived in the vicinity of their fathers, working the same or nearby land, and generally married women from sufficiently afar to be distinguishable by strontium levels in their remains, who came to live with them. These brides were unrelated to the family of the adult men, a fact that is demonstrated by mtDNA and by autosomal genetics that show that almost all of the adult women were unrelated to all of the other adult women (two of the adult were related to each other in some manner).

An absence of half-siblings in the cemetery also strongly suggests that at least this particular Neolithic community was not polygamous.

This large Neolithic cemetery is a particularly clear example of a patriarchal and patrilocal family system. But the pattern holds not only for essentially all of the first farmers of Europe, but also for the wave of steppe people who replaced most Neolithic men around the time of the early Bronze Age. And, with a handful of notable exceptions or minor introgressions into existing populations, the genetic make up of modern Europe was mostly in place by the end of the Bronze Age at about 1200 BCE.

Patriarchal family organization and patrilocality continued mostly uninterrupted for most of the next three thousand years after Bronze Age collapse. It became less rigid, however, during time periods and in places when forms of economic activity other than farming and herding were important.