Ancient DNA Reveals That Men Moved in With Their Brides’ Families in This Neolithic Settlement
A new study suggests that a 9,000-year-old society in Catalhoyuk, a proto-city in southern Anatolia, may have established a “female-centered” social structure
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/mellon.png)
When couples in Catalhoyuk, a Neolithic settlement in what is now southern Turkey, tied the knot some 9,000 years ago, the groom generally moved in with the bride’s family, a new study published in the journal Science suggests.
The paper, based on an ancient DNA analysis of 131 skeletons dated to between 7100 and 5950 B.C.E., found that individuals buried in communal graves beneath the same house often weren’t genetically related, at least in the later years of the settlement’s occupation. Those that were related tended to share maternal rather than paternal ancestry.
“If they were family, it was through the females,” study co-author Eline Schotsmans, an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia, tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Luke Radford. “The family’s identity went through the mother’s line.”
Quick facts: What ancient DNA reveals
- The scientists spent 12 years analyzing the Catalhoyuk skeletons’ ancient DNA, which is more degraded than modern-day samples.
- The DNA revealed the biological sex of infants and children buried at the Neolithic settlement. At this young age, sex is difficult to determine based on skeletal remains alone.
The findings indicate that women played a more prominent role in the Stone Age society than previously believed. In addition to documenting the skeletons’ maternal connections, the researchers note that female infants and children in Catalhoyuk were buried with five times more grave goods than their male counterparts.
“[Our analysis] clearly shows that male-centered practices people have often documented in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe were not universal,” co-author Mehmet Somel, an evolutionary geneticist at Turkey’s Middle East Technical University, tells Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove.
Catalhoyuk flourished in southern Anatolia for around 2,000 years, bringing together as many as 8,000 people across a 34-acre area. Residents “farmed, made bricks from mud, crafted weapons and created incredible art” without the benefit of extensive trade networks, writes science journalist Annalee Newitz in Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. Though not a city in the modern sense, Catalhoyuk has often been described as a proto-city, representing one of humanity’s first permanent communities.
A team of British archaeologists stumbled onto Catalhoyuk’s ruins in 1958. Subsequent excavations at the site have unearthed voluptuous female figurines, prompting researchers to speculate that Catalhoyuk’s Neolithic inhabitants worshipped a fertility deity known as the Mother Goddess. More recently, however, the discovery of numerous statues of animals and men has cast doubt on the centrality of this female goddess, instead pointing to the possibility that the figurines represent “older women who have achieved status,” said Lynn Meskell, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the DNA analysis, in a 2018 statement.
The scientists behind the new study are reluctant to draw conclusions about whether Catalhoyuk was a matriarchal society based on the burials alone. Matrilocality, or the practice of a man residing with his wife’s family, might have taken place at a “household level,” says co-author Eva Rosenstock, an archaeologist at the University of Bonn in Germany, in a statement, “but it’s not quite a matriarchate in the sense of women wielding power.”
But Benjamin S. Arbuckle, an archaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who was not involved in the study, has no such reservations. “If the sex patterns were reversed, there would likely be little hesitation in concluding that patriarchal power structures were at play,” Arbuckle writes in an essay published alongside the paper in Science. “This is reflective of the difficulty that many scholars have in imagining a world characterized by substantial female power despite abundant archaeological, historic and ethnographic evidence that matriarchal fields of power were and are widespread.”/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/3d/23/3d23a966-48f5-4942-a641-4ae6960395f1/skeletons.jpg)
