https://phys.org/news/2025-01-ancient-genomes-reveal-iron-age.html
An international team of geneticists, led by those from Trinity College Dublin, has joined forces with archaeologists from Bournemouth University to decipher the structure of British Iron Age society, finding evidence of female political and social empowerment.
The researchers seized upon a rare opportunity to sequence DNA from many members of a single community. They retrieved over 50 ancient genomes from a set of burial grounds in Dorset, southern England, in use before and after the Roman Conquest of AD 43. The results revealed that this community was centered around bonds of female-line descent.
Dr. Lara Cassidy, Assistant Professor in Trinity's Department of Genetics, led the study that has been published in Nature.
She said, "This was the cemetery of a large kin group. We reconstructed a family tree with many different branches and found most members traced their maternal lineage back to a single woman, who would have lived centuries before. In contrast, relationships through the father's line were almost absent.
"This tells us that husbands moved to join their wives' communities upon marriage, with land potentially passed down through the female line. This is the first time this type of system has been documented in European prehistory and it predicts female social and political empowerment.
"It's relatively rare in modern societies, but this might not always have been the case."
Incredibly, the team found that this type of social organization, termed "matrilocality," was not just restricted to Dorset. They sifted through data from prior genetic surveys of Iron Age Britain and, although sample numbers from other cemeteries were smaller, they saw the same pattern emerge again and again.
Journal Reference: Lara Cassidy et al., Continental influx and pervasive matrilocality in Iron Age Britain, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08409-6. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08409-6
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17, @01:44PM (5 children)
The ability to make a human being is pretty amazing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday January 17, @03:20PM (3 children)
If you're creating a society in which parentage means something (which many but not all societies do), it's far easier to figure out who mom is than dad: Everybody who is there on the kid's birthday witnesses who mom is, whereas the only people who might know who dad is are the parents. And bear in mind that when a woman is giving birth in these kinds of societies, pretty much every woman in town and probably some of the men are on hand to help out, because it's statistically incredibly risky to give birth right up until the last century or so what with modern medicine.
So really matrilineal thinking makes far more sense than, say, setting up a super-complex-and-often-extremely-authoritarian system in a futile effort aimed at trying to make it so that no woman ever has sex with any man who isn't her Officially Designated Partner.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday January 18, @04:24AM (2 children)
In some ways yes, but keep in mind that even if you do know reliable who is the son of whom, that doesn't really change the politics over how you shove other people out of the way in order to be the one that's in charge. Matrilineal societies don't address that issue in any way, shape or form, all it does is mean that you have an easier time following bloodlines back, it does not do anything about the fact that whomever gets to be king next has to have enough supporters to ward off efforts to usurp the throne.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday January 18, @11:44AM (1 child)
Why are you assuming the leader of the group is male? It could be that a society who wants to be matrilineal defaults to the first surviving daughter of the last woman in charge barring a good reason not to. Or you could also easily imagine a system similar to the Iroquois Confederacy, where there were men nominally in charge, but the women picked which men were in charge and watched everything those men did and could withdraw support at any time.
And yes, I did specifically say this was for societies where parentage or bloodline means something. There are societies where it largely doesn't, and someone could wind up in charge just by doing a bunch of awesome stuff that gets attention and support. There's a good argument that that's a much better system than "whose your daddy".
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday January 18, @07:06PM
Because historically, the vast majority of societies were either set up like that or got conquered by ones that did. When you need a literal standing army to defend your turf, having a woman at the top is really hard to sustain when the generals can just come in and overthrow you. The times I'm aware of women being in charge in societies are either more modern or were existing in places where military battles were less of a necessity. Even in places like China, Egypt and France where you do have notable women as leaders, it didn't last very long at all. And in the case of China's Empress Dowager, she was in charge of the entire empire. IIRC, it lasted for her before they got another male emperor.
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Friday January 17, @04:00PM
Pretty certain that the Powhatan people [wikipedia.org] had matriarchal inheritance of power - this being the group that Pocahontas came from:
Pocahonatas: Title and Status [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17, @01:48PM (2 children)
> and it predicts female social and political empowerment
Don't you also see a predominately female lineage in the brothel-villages of current day? When the men come to "visit" and don't stick around, and presumably the boys born there also don't stick around. It could in fact show abject poverty.
Maybe in the end, leaving the women to manage themselves, that does result in female social and political empowerment. Who am I to say.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ewk on Friday January 17, @02:05PM
The "the team had observed the more richly furnished Durotrigan burials to be those of women" from the article contradicts this abject poverty hypothesis.
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18, @01:16AM
No, you don't see that. You see women trafficked into them.