Paper short abstract:

If ever there was a natural and original way of organising family life and childcare, it involved matrilocal residence and matrilineal kinship. This paper will survey contemporary debates on early human kinship and the evidence in our distinctive anatomy and psychology supporting a matricultural origin.

Paper long abstract:

Early human kinship was matrilineal

by Chris Knight (chris.knight@live.com Senior Research Fellow, University College London, Anthropology Dept., UK)

If ever there was a natural and original way of organising family life and childcare, it involved matrilocal residence and matrilineal kinship. In the nineteenth century, this was agreed almost universally among anthropologists (e.g. Morgan, Engels, Frazer, Rivers). From the first half of the twentieth century, this consensus was savagely attacked by theorists who advocated the primacy of patriarchal marriage, privatised childcare and the patrilocal, patrilineal band (e.g. Malinowksi, Radcliffe-Brown, Lowie, Steward). But today's mainstream models of human evolution are validating much of the original matrilineal priority paradigm. These include Sarah Hrdy's theory of cooperative childcare as the matrix of emotional modernity; Kristen Hawkes' grandmother hypothesis; Steve Beckerman and Paul Valentine's partible paternity model; Chris Knight's sex-strike theory of hunter-gatherer brideservice; and Camilla Power and Ian Watts' female cosmetic coalitions theory for the emergence of human symbolic culture. These approaches have recently been vindicated thanks to advances in palaeogenetics, which confirm matrilocal residence as a deep-time pattern among hunter-gatherers in Africa. This paper will survey contemporary debates on early human kinship and the evidence in our distinctive anatomy and psychology supporting a matricultural origin.