12,000–10,000 BCE: (Matrilineal Descent Among Nilo-Saharan Speakers — Detailed Reconstruction of Kinship Vocabularies Revealing That Matrilineal Clans and Li…

12,000–10,000 BCE: (Matrilineal Descent Among Nilo-Saharan Speakers — Detailed Reconstruction of Kinship Vocabularies Revealing That Matrilineal Clans and Lineages Governed Descent and Inheritance as Far Back as the Proto-Nilo-Saharan Period Dating to the Bølling-Allerød Interstadials of Around 12,000 to 10,000 BCE, Matrilineal Descent Continuing Through the Shift to Pastoralism and Crop Cultivation in the Eighth Through Sixth Millennia and Persisting Among Peoples of Sudan and South Sudan into the Present Day): Over the past three decades, wide-ranging new cross-disciplinary research into human cultural and social evolution has further deepened our understandings and laid the foundations for more fully integrating the longue durée histories of all world regions into our telling of world history. For example, the detailed reconstruction of the history of kinship vocabularies of Nilo-Saharan-speaking peoples reveals that matrilineal clans and lineages governed descent and inheritance in those societies as far back as the proto-Nilo-Saharan period, which most probably dates to the period of the Bølling-Allerød interstadials of around 12,000 to 10,000 BCE. Matrilineal descent continued to prevail among the Nilo-Saharan speakers down through the periods of their shift to pastoralism and crop cultivation in the eighth through sixth millennia BCE. This kind of descent reckoning persisted as late probably as the second and first millennia BCE among the peoples of today’s Sudan and South Sudan — and is still the rule among a number of those societies today. This is a finding of enormous significance for the history of gender and social organization. The Nilo-Saharan-speaking peoples — the same peoples who contributed so much to the cultural foundations of ancient Egypt, who built Nabta Playa, who ruled at Qustul, who gave Egypt its words for cattle and beer and watermelons — organized their societies along matrilineal lines for at least twelve thousand years. Women were the conduits of lineage identity, inheritance, and social belonging. This is not a marginal anthropological curiosity. This is a fundamental feature of the social order of one of Africa’s most historically consequential language families, and it endured from the last Ice Age through the agricultural revolution and into the modern era. The peoples who helped build ancient Egyptian civilization came from matrilineal societies. What that means for our understanding of gender in early Nile Valley civilization is a question that the discipline has barely begun to ask.