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I re-read this after some 30 years after having recommended it to someone. Engels provides a materialist view of the origin and development of human social structures by linking the then-recent findings of Lewis Morgan on primitive families to the underlying means of procurring food, shelter, and tools.

He traces the origin of the modern male dominated monogamous family through early group marriage, development of the incest taboos, and gens clan structure arriving at the monogamous family with the advent of private property and the ability for a human to produce more than necessary to stay alive. With private property comes class-divided society, the relegation of women to the status of domestic slave, the need to know heirs to pass the property to, and the begining of the exploitation of man by man, in the first instance, through ancient slavery. He additionally shows that the end of the oppression of women will occur only when that family structure disappears, she is fully freed from the constraints of household drudgery and she plays a full role in productive society.

A triumph of the application of historical materialism.

A few years ago I read "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond who summarizes contemporary understanding of the transition of the hunter-gatherer to settled agricultural status. By my memory, he doesn't deal at all with social structures. Diamond decides that environmental accident governs differences between European versus other human development. It would be interesting to re-look at the Diamond book now.