Daughters stayed home, sons left: That was the rule in a 9,000-year-old Turkish village, says a 2025 Science paper that sequenced 131 ancient skeletons

Pick up almost any account of early human civilization, and the story is much the same: men at the center, women adapting around them. But a discovery from one of the world's oldest settlements is quietly challenging that picture, and the evidence is written in 9,000-year-old DNA.

According to a study titled 'Female lineages and changing kinship patterns in Neolithic Çatalhöyük,' published in the journal Science by Eren Yüncü and colleagues, ancient DNA from 131 skeletons found at the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in what is now southern Turkey was analyzed. The settlement dates to roughly 9,000 years ago, with the study covering remains from 7,100 to 5,950 BCE, a research effort that took 12 years to complete. Their findings suggest a challenge to a long-held assumption: in this society, it appears men moved into their wives' households, not the other way around.

A proto-city unlike anything before it
According to Scientific American, Çatalhöyük covered 34 acres, may have supported up to 8,000 people, and flourished for nearly 2,000 years without interruption. Annalee Newitz, a science journalist, writes in Four Lost Cities that residents “farmed, made bricks from mud, crafted weapons, and created incredible art” all without the benefit of large trade networks. It is not a city in the modern sense, but has long been described as a proto-city, one of mankind's first permanent communities. Residents buried their dead under the floors of their homes, a practice that gave researchers an extraordinary genetic window into the past.


What the DNA revealed
According to the Science study, individuals buried in communal graves under the same house were often not closely related genetically. Relatives were more likely to share maternal than paternal ancestry. “If they were family, it was through the females,” said co-author Eline Schotsmans, an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia. “The family's identity went through the mother's line.”

According to the researchers, the DNA also revealed the biological sex of infants and children buried at the site, something bones alone cannot reliably show before puberty. That opened up a second, equally striking finding.

Men moved in, not women
The Science study's 46 authors estimated that female offspring stayed in contact with their buildings between 70 and 100% of the time across generations, in stark contrast to other European Neolithic communities, which were patrilineal and patrilocal. When a couple married in Çatalhöyük, it was the groom who moved in. The bride stayed at home.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, the Science study's co-author Mehmet Somel, an evolutionary geneticist at Turkey's Middle East Technical University, says that the analysis "clearly shows that male-centered practices people have often documented in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe were not universal."

Burials reveal five times more offerings for baby girls
Female infants and children at Çatalhöyük were buried with five times more grave goods than males, the Science study found. This included artifacts such as beads, pendants, and decorations

The Mother Goddess debate
According to Smithsonian Magazine, in 1958, a team of British archaeologists discovered the ruins of Çatalhöyük. Later excavations found voluptuous figurines of women, leading scientists to believe the people who lived there worshipped a fertility goddess called the Mother Goddess. According to Smithsonian, more recent discoveries of statues of animals and men cast doubt on that theory. Lynn Meskell, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania who did not take part in the DNA study, said in a 2018 statement the figurines might be “older women who have achieved status.”

What it does and doesn't mean
The researchers behind the new study are cautious not to overstate their conclusions. According to Türkiye Today, co-author Eva Rosenstock, an archaeologist at the University of Bonn, said, “You might be able to call that matrilocality at household level, but it's not quite a matriarchate in the sense of women wielding power.”

Yet not all are so reticent. According to Smithsonian Magazine, Benjamin S. Arbuckle, an archaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who was not involved in the study, wrote in an essay published alongside the paper in Science that “if the sex patterns were reversed, there would likely be little hesitation in concluding that patriarchal power structures were at play” and called this “reflective of the difficulty that many scholars have in imagining a world characterized by substantial female power despite abundant archaeological, historic and ethnographic evidence.”

According to the study ‘Female lineages and changing kinship patterns in Neolithic Çatalhöyük’, this is the earliest genetically reconstructed pattern of social organization documented in any food-producing society in the world. That’s worth pondering for American readers used to thinking of “traditional” family structures as fixed and ancient. The past was never as monolithic as we think, and sometimes, the groom just moved in.