A pair of studies now present an analysis of stable isotopes and skeletal remains from 395 ancient individuals who lived 8000 to 5800 BCE, from whom DNA from 131 individuals could be sequenced (see the Perspective by Arbuckle). Yüncü et al. found that kinship patterns changed over time in this settlement, but individuals from the same houses or nearby ones were primarily related through the maternal line.
I knew this was true from my visit to the most traditional Berber village in Morocco - I knew it was like traveling back in time thousands of years. Humanure composting was used to grow food in the desert. The women did all the farming and the women made all the clothing. I knew this was the original farming as it had spread out of West Asia.
"With Çatalhöyük, we now have the oldest genetically-inferred social organisation pattern in food-producing societies," study co-author Mehmet Somel, an evolutionary geneticist at Middle East Technical University in Turkey, told Live Science in an email. "Which turns out to be female-centered."
https://bio.metu.edu.tr/en/faculty/mehmet-somel
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adr2915
Flores-Blanco,
L., Hall, M., Hinostroza, L., Eerkens, J., Aldenderfer, M., & Haas,
R. (2025). Altiplano agricultural origins was a process of economic
resilience, not hardship: Isotope chemistry, zooarchaeology, and
archaeobotany in the Titicaca Basin, 5.5-3.0 ka. PloS One, 20(6), e0325626. https://doi.org/10.1371/
The study doesn’t just rewrite the history of agriculture in one part of the world. It contributes to a growing global reevaluation of how farming began.
Across regions, new data are pushing back against older models of agricultural origins rooted in crisis. In coastal East Asia, early cultivation coincided with stable foraging. In parts of North America, maize spread slowly through interwoven economies of foraging and farming.
The story from the Andes reinforces the idea that people didn’t adopt agriculture because they had to. They adopted it because it worked—and because they could.
"This was not a revolution," Flores-Blanco emphasized. "It was an adaptation, built on knowledge, flexibility, and choice."
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