Matrilineality, at times called matriliny, is the tracing of kinship through the female line. It may also correlate with a social system in which people identify with their matriline, their mother's lineage, and which can involve the inheritance of property and titles. A matriline is a line of descent where a person inherits his or her mother's lineage. In a matrilineal descent system, individuals belong to the same descent group as their mothers. The matriline of historical nobility was also called their enatic or uterine ancestry, in contrast to the patrilineal or "agnatic" ancestry. The matriline is also sometimes referred to as the "distaff" side or "spindle" side.
== Early human kinship == Scholars disagree on the nature of early human, that is, Homo sapiens, kinship. In the late 19th century, most scholars believed, influenced by Lewis H. Morgan's book Ancient Society, that early kinship was matrilineal. Friedrich Engels took this up in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. This thesis that our first domestic institution was the matrilineal clan, not the family, became communist orthodoxy. However, by the 20th century most social anthropologists disagreed, although during the 1970s and 1980s, feminist scholars often revived it.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).