In matrilineal cultures, a boy's key male relative may be his mother's brother
Among the Akan of Ghana and Ivory Coast, some 20 million people, property and public office pass through the mother's line. A man is closely bound to his maternal uncle but only loosely to his father's brother, and when it comes to inheritance, his sister's son can take priority over his own son.
Matrilineality means tracing kinship through the female line: you belong to your mother's descent group. Old genealogy called this the distaff or spindle side. In some matrilineal societies, especially where couples live with the wife's family, a maternal uncle acts as a social father to his nieces and nephews, while the biological father plays little part in raising them.
Akan society shows how intricate this can be. Lineages descended from a single ancestress control farmland, honour ancestors, oversee marriages and settle disputes, and they combine into eight great clans called abusua. Marrying within your own abusua is forbidden, so a husband and wife belong to different clans, and a mother and children may live in one household while the father lives in another. Yet the system is not purely maternal: everyone also belongs to one of 12 spirit groups inherited from their father, each with its own taboos and rituals. City life has pushed some Akan families toward nuclear households.
Other examples span the globe. Among the Tuareg of the Sahara, status passes through women, women traditionally owned the livestock, most women could read and write while most men could not, and, unlike in most Muslim cultures, men wear veils and women do not. South Africa's Rain Queen title passes only to women. The Iroquois Confederacy, founded roughly between 1000 and 1450, gave women matrilineal rights and a voice in decisions, including whether to go to war, under an oral constitution not written down until about 1880.
The deep history is debated. In the late 19th century many scholars thought early humans were matrilineal, an idea Friedrich Engels adopted and that became communist orthodoxy before most anthropologists rejected it. Since about 2008, genetic studies have revived hints of early matriliny, and a re-examination of hunter-gatherer data found about 40% of groups lived flexibly with either spouse's kin.
Source: Matrilineality
