When in 1877, the anthropologist Lewis Morgan published his Ancient Society, Marx and Engels were enthusiastic for what they believe represented the first scientific analysis of primitive societies and, by extension, of the prehistory of class societies. In his famous book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels extended the main findings and thus established on the evolution of the family and the origin of women's oppression that was become the marxist reference. Since then, ethnological and archaeological materials have accumulated, and the fragments gave way to a vast fresco ; unfortunately, attempts to update this contribution have remained very rare.
This is the objective of this essay which, while noting the many outdated conceptions that lie in the Origin of the Family, suggests that the materialist method proposed by Marx and Engels could well remain the best key to enter the distant past of human societies and update the root of gender inequality.