Late 19th century anthropologists wanted to believe that patrilineal descent (PLD) was the original mode of society because 1) they were trained in a classical Latin environment which upheld the Roman values of Patria potestas where the father had absolute control over the family and estate, and 2) by upholding PLD as Originary, one could claim that capitalist property rights were the original form of human society. This was a view held by lawmakers and statesmen because such a view could put a brake against communism entering England in the late 1800s. If an anthropologist like McLennan or Smith posited that matrilineal descent (MLD), which holds much property in common, was the earlier system of kinship, then many might have believed this would have given communists a foothold. Sir Henry Maine (pictured above) in Ancient Society maintained that Roman Patria Potestas was at the seat of Aryan, Israelite, and Hindu society. John McLennan thoroughly debunks this in The Patriarchal Theory, but McLennan didn’t seem to convince his rival.
(It’s interesting to look at guys like McLennan and others during his age like W. Robertson Smith and James Frazer, all Scotsmen who refuted the Originary PLD argument. I believe Scotsmen were better acquainted with what Originary MLD was, since they would’ve been more familiar with the Scottish Highlanders who were closer to MLD. Maine was a Scotsman too so it makes you wonder where this rift came from.)
It’s interesting then to see how in the 60s the idea of Originary matrilineal descent (MLD) took off in America, possibly as a bulwark against McCarthyism. The trend started with Marija Gimbutas who made some great discoveries in Turkey, finding that MLD systems prevailed among Bronze Age cities. Other liberals jumped on this notion that, at the origin of human society, matrilineal descent prevailed, holding property in common, worshipping goddesses, and emphasizing more images and less alphabets. The artwork of the non-alphabetic cultures like Egypt and Minoan Crete is far more beautiful than the jagged artwork seen in alphabetic cultures like the Hittites, and the near-total absence of artwork in iconoclastic cultures like Israel and in Islam. Leonard Shlain attributes this to some neurological shifts but a much simpler explanation is that MLD systems don’t foster alphabets since languages cannot be “inherited” as easily. Within MLD, they tend to mix and merge. The same can be said of MLD’s association with polytheism, and PLD’s with monotheism. The latter prevents mixture since the theology is allowed to descend vertically without creating some vast network of gods and goddesses, which Moses laments throughout the Torah as when he calls for the destruction of the Midianites (which he married into!!!!).
The liberals, I believe, took the MLD hypothesis too far though. They held that matrilineal descent implies that women somehow ran societies back then, resulting in more peace. Eisler claims that the absence of warfare imagery in Neolithic pottery is evidence that MLD societies were peaceful.
This simply isn’t true, for many reasons. First, “violence” among MLD societies usually devolves toward smaller scale killings: female infanticide to maintain high brideprices, human sacrifices made to harvest goddesses, etc. While we don’t know the number of babies killed, we can safely say that there were very few human sacrifices. And yet, does this mean that killing 5 human sacrifice victims is “better” than 100 men dying in war? I don’t understand where this moral lens comes from, except that it’s purely utilitarian and ignores the horrors of both.
Second, just because violence isn’t depicted in art doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Third, lack of violence might, unfortunately, imply ineptitude. The Bronze Age cities were unprepared for the hordes of Iron Age footsoldiers who destroyed the cities in the Catastrophe ~1300-1200 BC.
Fourth, MLD systems are predicated on violence by their nature. Kinship systems traced through the mother aren’t just so you can have cool looking tattoos. These bloodlines were blood-feud enforcement mechanisms. If someone was murdered, the MLD-based kinship systems aligned to enact revenge, or extract payment. Often these groups simply killed another member of the offender’s kin, which balanced the scales. Blood-feud is every bit a part of MLD as it is part of PLD. In fact, PLD might be a mitigating force against blood-feud since it tends toward endogamy, and an endogamous society will begin outsourcing revenge to courts to prevent intra-familial feuding. We see this in Israel, where blood feuds are mitigated with the Cities of Refuge first in Numbers (arguably an earlier document) and with the talion, eye for an eye laws which are enacted against the individual, not the kin group.
Fifth, MLD networks are built assuming that the meshes of these groups will come to each other’s aid in the event of warfare. Native American warfare was endemic to the continent. The evidence of this is not seen in the body count, but rather in the absolute strictness of exogamous marriage laws which offered almost no wiggle room. You could NOT marry into your own clan because that would reduce the power of extra-clan alliances. How can this be seen as some kind of Edenic peace?
Lastly, MLD does not imply matriarchal authority. There’s little reason to believe that African or Native American systems, most of which were matrilineal, were matriarchal in power structure. Men in African MLD societies often held their wives in near-slavery, and Native American men were anything but effeminate. Even the staunchest native rights liberal has to admit that living in Native American society would have hardly been “equal”. Women didn’t go on raids, didn’t hunt buffalo, didn’t do war.
In short, two trends have dominated academia in the past 150 years. The first, held by the Victorians, believed in Originary patrilineal descent in order to justify a capitalist property rights system and act as a bulwark against communism, which was also naturally backed by a Latin-based academic standard that held Roman Patria Potestas as the gold standard. The second, held by the 60s liberals, believed in Originary matrilineal descent to justify a postwar social order that could mitigate high divorce rates and satisfy those who were fed up with McCarthyism which was leading America into the Vietnam War. Neither side was looking purely at the facts. I believe the 60s liberals were less wrong, as MLD appears to be everywhere the Originary force behind kinship, but their views have been so ideological as to give the impression that stone age and Neolithic society were somehow less prone to conflict than we’ve been after WWII.
The scientific “community” (particularly the orthodox Darwinists) has failed on this front in 2 ways: 1) by associating human violence with animal aggression, and 2) by claiming that human institutions are birthed by cognitive advances in Homo sapiens due to external pressures. Human violence is at once “a big problem” while never really looked at.
It’s shocking that this view (which I recently railed against here) continues to flow downstream unabated, flooding into every pop culture marsh on planet earth. I honestly know of no other thinkers who have noted that the human combat loop is functionally different than every animal’s combat loop due to the introduction of weaponry. It’s gotta be the biggest blind spot in modern science.