I found it interesting that...

I found it interesting to read that some societies trace their lineage through the female line, and particularly that these societies were in the area of Europe and Anatolia. What I found interesting was not the existence of matriarchal societies, but the location. I thought that the locations of these societies would have coincided with the existing matriarchal societies, for example some spots in Nepal. 

On page 43 of the text, the critical role of women in agriculture as well as their production of textiles is cited as a possible reason for tracing lineage through the female line. When I made my foray into anthropology for my first two years of college, this was a main topic of a course I took Sex, Gender, and Kinship. In this course, a prevailing theory about why lineage might be traced through a female line regarded division of land. In instances where the lineage of a society is traced through the female line, land is less often divided. This is of particular importance in areas with less productive land, such as alpine agricultural areas. Alpine agriculture produces exceptionally low crop yields, so it would be ill advised to divide this land. It is not so much that tracing the lineage through females alone prevents land division, but that so many of these societies also send all the brothers of a family to marry the same woman. Since a woman is only impregnated by one man at a time, it also is a way of controlling population. In turn, this also puts less demand on crop production. 

I bring this up because the relative equality of women in Paleolithic and Neolithic societies was mentioned repeatedly within the text, and attributed to their contribution in food gathering, as well as their horticulture skills. If this alone were the reason for a society to trace lineage through the female line, would the occurrence of this not been more widespread?