It seems that, in pre-science times, the only certain parent of a child was the mother. Why then, were families traced through fathers (which, before gene testing, were still guesswork)?
This is not the domain of historians since all the oldest documents come from patriarchal societies which regard women as a man's property and control fatherhood by meting out draconic punishment for a woman's infidelity.
Societies discovered later, like the Iroquis, had no concept of fatherhood which lead Frederick Engels to suggest that it appeared together with Agrarian society. His ideas were picked up by second wave feminists and can therefore be quoted today without making you sound like a marxist.