Family Ties: the Stone-Age Roots of the Nuclear Family

A recurring theme in Politeia and the old "Lighthouse" (before it became exclusively 'arty') are the so-called dialectics. Read all about it in the dossier - an explanatory introduction is at the bottom.

What we mean, are the Hegelian dialectic, which grew out of the Kantian dialectic, which led to the Marxist dialectic, and now morphed into the Postmodern dialectic.

Don't be fooled by nonsense about women's lib, gay rights and same sex marriage: these are all ruses to take out one of the main pillars of 'the power structure', romantic love and marriage.

Remember that upsurge in Swedish films and books around the sixties, portraying marriage and family life as sheer and sure hell ...? That was no coincidence! (Here's a Dutch book of some notoriety, but every Western country probably has its own version. Sartre's existentialism did away with all human company in general: "hell, are the others.")

Romantic love - according to Ayn Rand - is a bourgeois, selfish, social construct that becomes fashionable in societies with a strong middle class. That being the case, all the more reason to shatter that important pillar.

Among the nobility and the peasantry marriage has always been an institution for the formalization of family ties and the regulation of inheritances. It was of course sanctioned by a church ceremony, preferably held before the bride's bun was showing - just for good measure so as to ensure the groom's party wouldn't be left holding a barren bag... eh, hag.

But here's news: A Stone Age burial in central Germany has yielded the earliest evidence of people living together as a family within a tribal social structure ...

MSNBC: "The Flintsteins? Germans find Stone Age family - 4,600-year-old grave yields genetic evidence of family life (and death)" (includes video material)

(...) The 4,600-year-old grave contained the remains of a man, woman and two youngsters, and DNA analysis shows they were a mother, father and their children. (...)

"By establishing the genetic links between the two adults and two children buried together in one grave, we have established the presence of the classic nuclear family in a prehistoric context in Central Europe — to our knowledge the oldest authentic molecular genetic evidence so far," lead author Wolfgang Haak of the University of Adelaide, Australia, said in a statement.

The researchers studied four multiple burials at Eulau, Saxony-Anhalt, all dated to the same time and containing adults and children carefully buried facing each other. (...) >>>

Perhaps tribal people 4,600 years ago, knew what we have been taught to forget for political reasons: that single mum families are the surest road to poverty and dependence - dependence on the state, all for our own good, of course. No wonder it was sold in Europe, first as morally acceptable, then as a value and even a right.

- Filed on Articles in "The Dialectics" -