The ancient DNA from Turkish Stone Age burial finally gave decades of debate over whether the 9,000-year-old city of Chhatarhekk is a matrilineal society. The study ultimately confirms that experts have long suspected. Women and girls were important figures in this agricultural society.
“We use Chatalhaek to have the oldest genetically infected social organizational patterns in a food production society,” Mehmet Sohmel, a study co-author who is an evolutionary genetic geneticist at the Middle East Institute of Technology in Turkey, told Live Science in an email. “It turns out to be female-centric.”
The new study was published in the journal Science on Thursday (June 26th).
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Located in southern Türkiye, Chhatarheik was built around 7100 BC and was occupied for nearly 1,000 years. The vast settlement – spread over 32.5 acres (13.2 hectares) – is known for its elaborate symbolism, including a house entered through the roof, a burial under the floor of the house, a vivid mural, and a diverse array of female figures.
When archaeologist James Mellard first excavated Chatalhaek in the early 1960s, he interpreted many female figurines as evidence of a native language society that practiced “mother goddess” worship, perhaps as a way to continue the major economic transition from foraging to grain-based agriculture, ensuring a good harvest.
In the 1990s, Stanford archaeologist Ian Hoder took over the excavations at Chatalhoik, and his research instead suggested that society was primarily egalitarian without meaningful social or economic differences between men and women.
Related: Rare Neolithic “Goddess” figurine discovered in Türkiye
To further explore the social organization of Chatarheikh, a new study has analyzed the DNA of 131 skeletons between 7100 and 5800 buried under the floor of the house.
The researchers connected 109 people in 31 buildings, and found that all first-degree relatives (parents, children, siblings) were buried together in the same building, and that second-degree relatives (uncles, aunts, ne, nie, grandparents) and third-degree relatives (first Kohsan and great grandparents, etc. were often buried. This suggests that nuclear or large families played a role in building households in Chatarheyuk, the researchers wrote in the study.
A mother or just a female lineage?
However, there was another interesting trend in intergenerational connections between house burials, researchers noted. They were primarily based on maternal lineage.
“We weren’t particularly looking for these maternal connections within the building,” Somel said, but “it clearly shows that the male-centric practices that people often documented in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe were not universal.”
Ancient DNA analysis also revealed biological sex of infants and young children. This cannot be done solely on the skeletal basis until post-puberty. Once the biological sex of these children was determined, researchers identified trends associated with women in the grave.
“The pattern of more burial gifts for women’s babies wasn’t what we expected,” Sommel said.
Chatarheik is the oldest society in which DNA evidence reveals women-centric social organizations.
“To my knowledge, this constitutes the first systematic evidence of such a continuous, maternally organized Neolithic community,” Jens Notoff, an archaeologist at the German Institute of Archaeology, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.
“I preferred to use “female-centric” instead of matrinil. Because the latter is about how people define relatives,” Somel said. “While Chatarheik’s households may have been Matrinial, I think it might be desirable to use more general terms. Being cautious is always a good thing,” he said.
But Benjamin Arbuckle, an archaeologist at Chapel Hill, writes from a science perspective, “If sexual patterns are reversed, there will be little hesitation in conclusion that patriarchal power structures are playing.”
“This reflects what many scholars have in imagining a world characterized by substantial female power despite the abundant archaeological, historical and ethnographic evidence.
Chatarheik now stands in stark contrast to the patriarchal patterns seen in Neolithic Europe, Notlov says.
Analyzing the skeleton of Chatarheik to understand social relationships is only the beginning, according to Sommel. Understanding whether this site is unique is an important next step.
“We are currently creating similar data from previous societies from this region,” he said.
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