Anthropology began as archeology--not just the archaeology of "prehistoric" human or quasi-human bones and stones, but also the study of other things presumably archaic. The most notable of these was the social life and thought of the world's remaining peoples who could be taken as proxies for those who supplied these bones and used these stones as tools. Although the legitimacy of this surrogacy has been questioned in the history of the discipline, it remains strong today, even in popular discourse: witness the attraction of images of "cavemen," people "from the Stone Age," and, especially as part of "radical" feminist theory, "matriarchy." Anthropology, at least in America, also began as ideas about "primitive" kinship, mostly through the Herculean efforts of Victorian-era scholar Lewis Henry Morgan. In this article, the author illustrates how at odds the realities of kinship in human groups (in which the preeminent importance of biological parenthood is just about universally respected) is with the feminist and collectivist pronouncements to be found in kinship studies today. (Contains 15 footnotes.)