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What was life like some 8,000–9,000 years ago for the people on the East Mound at Çatalhöyük, an important Neolithic settlement in central Anatolia? And what role did women hold in their society?

An international team led by Turkish, Danish, Swedish and U.S. researchers has investigated the genetic material of a total of 131 individuals who are buried there. What is striking is the preference afforded to female lineages. Their findings have now been in the journal Science.

The settlement, near the city of Konya in Turkey, is among the oldest permanently inhabited sites in the world. The people occupied mudbrick houses crammed together side by side and made a living from growing crops and farming livestock.

"Çatalhöyük is the leading site for finds dating from the Pottery Neolithic in Anatolia," explains Dr. Eva Rosenstock from the Bonn Center for ArchaeoSciences at the University. "People were already making clay vessels there in the 7th and 6th millennia BCE. The settlement lay on the route along which Neolithic technologies spread to Europe from their home in western Asia."

University of Bonn researcher's excavations

Between 2006 and 2013, Rosenstock and her team excavated part of the West Mound at Çatalhöyük (ca. 6100–5500 BCE), which overlapped with the settlement of the late East Mound. In the course of their project, the archaeologists discovered two skeletons of newborn babies. "These are the only prehistoric human remains found on the West Mound to date and were incorporated into the study," Rosenstock says.

Following proper archaeological procedure, Rosenstock's team dug out the skeletons and recorded their osteological findings, thus supplying the necessary context. Their archaeogeneticist colleagues then ran their analyses. "The methods have been around for some time, but the material that makes up the samples is new," the archaeologist reveals.

"Until a few years ago, people thought that teeth were the best bioarchive for genetic material, but it turns out that the petrous bone—being the densest bone in the human body—is much better." This approach enabled the genetic tests to be carried out despite the unfavorable conditions at the find site caused by its arid continental climate.

Corpses under the floor

The people of Çatalhöyük buried their dead directly underneath their homes. Previous studies into hereditary anatomical features of the skeletons had thrown up a surprising finding, namely that most of the people buried in a house were unrelated, while those who were most similar to one another were spread out across the whole settlement.

In other words, households appear to have been formed according to rules other than kinship. Did cultural, economic or social factors have a hand in this? Says Rosenstock, "Ever since it's been possible to study DNA that's this old, therefore, we've been using archaeogenetics to try and see how the occupants of a particular house were related."

The two skeletons of newborns that Rosenstock's team dug up were likewise found inside the same building, and they were not closely related either, as the study recently published in Science shows. What is more, they belonged to the same gene pool as the bodies found on the East Mound.

"This is yet another sign of the continuity between the East and West Mounds, which we've been able to show with our excavations." Previously, researchers had believed that settlement had been interrupted for several centuries and a major cultural shift had taken place.

Atop the remains of one's ancestors

For centuries, the houses in Çatalhöyük were always built on what were left of their predecessors' walls. This meant that, not only did the mounds grow rapidly upwards, they also provide material "maps" of a Neolithic culture of remembrance in which people lived on top of generations of remains left by their ancestors—including the skeletons of former occupants. We do not yet know why, about 6000 BCE, this tradition was broken briefly and the West Mound was begun.

The study now largely confirms the finding that being biologically related was just one factor among many when it came to forming households in Çatalhöyük. "However, female lineages were more important than male ones here in the 7th millennium BCE," reveals Rosenstock, who is also a member of the Present Pasts Transdisciplinary Research Area at the University of Bonn.

People buried in the same building were more closely related along the female line than the male. "This suggests that women were more important as far as forming households went," Rosenstock says, drawing her conclusion based on the analyses. "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." Nevertheless, she concedes, locality can be used to draw conclusions about power relations in many cultures.

Did the people of Çatalhöyük live in a society dominated by women? Notions of a prehistoric matriarchate date back to ancient times and have been revisited repeatedly ever since. "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 says.

Women were buried alongside a richer assortment of grave goods, which might indicate a higher status. Rosenstock adds, "And now, several decades later, material from the new excavations and state-of-the-art scientific methods have been used to uncover yet more facts."

This raises some further questions: when and why did the role played by men and kinship become more important in Europe as the Neolithic advanced? And what were the next developments in western Asia?