Families as The Unit of Cultural Production In A Civilization.

While Paternalism (headmanship) has been universal, when insurance and gathering were more important than productivity and warfare, matrilinealism seemed to determine what limited property was important (relations) and what inheritance and therefore ownership. But when productivity became more important than insurance, patrilinealism seemed to develop into the primary social order determining what increasingly complex property was important (livestock, territory, agrarian production, built capital). Now that women can seek rents via the state, we are seeing property return to communalism and men attempt to preserve their control over it.

Without families, I do not yet understand how civilization can function any more than I can understand how an economy can function without prices and incentives.