[bluGill]

That idealism isn't how families happened. Traditoinally you split the farm when the sons (it need not be sons, but sexism generally comes in somehow as someone needs to leave home for genetic diverstiy reasons and the entire culture needs to follow the pattern in general so lets just talk about sons with the understanding that sometimes it was daughters) until the farm was too small to support the family at which point the oldest son got the farm and the other kids were sent off on their own. If you were lucky enough to be the oldest son you got to stay home and raise your own family with your cousins nearby in the village - but for your brothers who knows where they went, if they had a family it wasn't in sight and they didn't have the family.

[jcranmer]

> Traditoinally you split the farm when the sons (it need not be sons, but sexism generally comes in somehow as someone needs to leave home for genetic diverstiy reasons and the entire culture needs to follow the pattern in general so lets just talk about sons with the understanding that sometimes it was daughters)

The anthropological term for the kind of arrangement you're talking about is "patrilocality." Matrilocality is where it's the daughters instead of the sons, and it's much more the norm in the indigenous peoples of the Americas (and somewhat more sporadically in Africa). The really fun part is that matrilocality does not imply matrilineality (let alone matriarchy), so you can have a society that is both patrilineal and matrilocal.