Ancient DNA Confirms Women’s Unexpected Status In One Of The Oldest Known Neolithic Settlements

DNA from more than 100 individuals buried in Çatalhöyük’s East Mound reveals the inhabitants were more likely to live with relatives on the female line, and the social structure changed slowly over centuries.

Along with Göbekli Tepe, also in modern Turkey, Çatalhöyük is one of the oldest known permanent settlements in the world. No records of the civilization that built it and thrived there for at least 1,200 years have survived, even in legend, so everything we know about the society comes from what has been extracted from the ground. 

Some differences between Çatalhöyük and the next wave of settlements are obvious, such as the way houses were crammed together without streets, and bodies were buried under the floors of living quarters. Now, genetic material from those bodies reveals something far more profound about the status of women.

One of the features of Çatalhöyük that is hardest to comprehend from our perspective is that kinship appears almost irrelevant to burial (and presumably living) sites. Although all the bodies found there come from a single broadly related tribe, bodies from the same room have been found to be only slightly more likely to be closely related than those on the other side of town. If this is the way Çatalhöyükians lived, it was more student dorm than nuclear family.

Nevertheless, the new research shows the distribution is not entirely random. “Female lineages were more important than male ones here in the seventh millennium BCE," Dr Eva Rosenstoick of the University of Bonn said in a statement. "This suggests that women were more important as far as forming households went.” 

Graves and modern customs in some other parts of the world show a pattern of men moving to the lands of their partner, known as matrilocality, rather than the other way. “It's not quite a matriarchate in the sense of women wielding power," Rosenstock said. Nevertheless, matrilocality does seem to be associated with societies in which women have more status and often power. It’s probably hard for men to mistreat their partners when living with her family, and it’s certainly not conducive to rulers having large harems, as was common in later cities of Çatalhöyük’s size.

This isn’t the first time the idea that women had more power at Çatalhöyük than its successors has been raised. "Even the very first person to dig here, James Mellaart, suspected that women were very important in Çatalhöyük – primarily based on the female figurines and other objects that were found," Rosenstock said. 

Female figurines might not seem much to go on – the frequent presence of women in Renaissance Art wasn’t accompanied by any great power – but there was other evidence as well. For example, archaeologists usually consider the quantity and quality of grave goods a mark of social status. Rosenstock is part of a team that report Çatalhöyük’s women were buried with more, at least in the earlier East Mound era. On the other hand, based on the size of the rooms and the quantity of grave goods, Çatalhöyük society was much more equal than today, let alone than eras in between where kings' wealth dwarfed their subjects.

Mellaart’s conclusions inspired a wave of books and art celebrating a lost matriarchy. Many of these drew conclusions about younger, although still very ancient, societies that have now been debunked, but the nature of Çatalhöyük remains far less certain.

Çatalhöyük was occupied for more than 1,000 years, and unsurprisingly, society changed over that time. For example, the new research reveals the lack of kinship among those buried together was primarily a feature later in the city’s time. Earlier on, houses were occupied by extended families, as has been true for most of the time since. The predominance of female figurines that made such an impression on Mellaart is mainly confined to the later part of its occupation.

Rosenstock leads a team that was originally excavating Çatalhöyük’s West Mound, which overlapped in time with the Eastern counterpart, but is generally younger. There, they found the skeletons of two young babies. “These are the only prehistoric human remains found on the West Mound to date and were incorporated into the study," Rosenstock said. 

DNA is usually destroyed over millennia in hot, dry climates, but Rosenstock and colleagues felt the need to try. "Until a few years ago, people thought that teeth were the best bioarchive for genetic material,” Rosenstock said. However, with skeletons too young to have teeth, the team looked to other bones. “It turns out that the petrous bone – being the densest bone in the human body – is much better," she said.

The two babies Rosenstock’s team had found were not closely related, echoing the pattern found elsewhere in Çatalhöyük. On the other hand, both were clearly part of the same gene pool as the much larger number of bodies found at the East Mound, confirming continuity between the two.

The benefits of petrous bone were applied by a much larger team, of which Rosenstock was part, to construct a map of the genetics from East Mound based on genetic material from 131 individuals buried in 35 houses.

Other findings of the study include that genetically, the population of Çatalhöyük did not change greatly over its long occupation. Nevertheless, genetic diversity did increase with time, possibly as a product of extensive trade revealed by items made far afield.

The study is published in Science. The same edition also contains a paper on the genetic legacy created when people from Çatalhöyük’s region spread into Europe via the Aegean.