Matriarchy: I Have a Little Farm in the Stone Age

Ten thousand years ago, beside Yunmeng Marsh in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, a dying fourteen-year-old girl opened her eyes.

Her name was A Tai, the biological granddaughter of the old matriarch of the Marsh tribe. No one knew that the body was now inhabited by a soul from ten thousand years in the future: a master's graduate in botany, with a wealth of knowledge about seeds, soil, and survival.

When A Tai awoke, she discovered a world of matrilineal clans. Women gathered food, men practiced visiting marriages, and children belonged to their mothers' clans. The tribe had only fifty people, living in caves and gathering with crude wicker baskets. They cooked in leaky clay pots, and every winter people starved to death.

A Tai began to make changes. She wove tighter baskets, increasing the harvest by thirty percent. She discovered that acorns had to be soaked to remove their toxins, giving the tribe a reliable food supply for autumn and winter. She led the women in planting their first experimental field, beginning the long transition from foraging to agriculture.

The tribe steadily grew, from fifty people to five hundred, then five thousand. A Tai sent people down the Yangtze, where they found salt by the sea. She opened mines and smelted copper, giving the tribe tools harder than stone. She built a raised city where tens of thousands could escape the great flood. Women fled there from all directions, because here they had their own granaries and their own salt.

But shadows were closing in from afar. A warlike tribe of men was on the rise, treating the women they captured as property and the land they seized as their territory. Twenty thousand against thirty thousand, matrilineal against patrilineal: the final battle was fought beside Yunmeng Marsh.