"... that the lineage be traced by female descent is normal: after all it is women that give birth; power, however, is then to be found on the avuncular level: the brother of the mother, the uncle (lat. avunculus, hence avuncular), is the head of the family. This is true of the Iroquois, as of the ancient Hebrews, as of Islam. Nothing feminist about it, it is simply a way of tracing descent: of keeping track of people in relation to oneself. The real innovation is paternity: the attribution of the child not the mother and her family, but to the father and his family ..."
This change from female to male inheritance came about well within historical times, without any record of why the change was made, even though civilization itself for thousands of years before historical times seems to have been happy with deriving lineage through the female.
The innovation was the substitution of paternity for matriarchal inheritance, as you noted, Ippolita. That wasn't a small change, it was a major revolution that should have left many visible tracks, seeing as how it happened within historical times.
Why the silence? There should be a distinct record of the change, of what would have been a world-shaking change in both property and civil law.
No silence: what you call 'historical times' (meaning times that have left written trace of themselves, as opposed to prehistoric times, of which only mute artifacts remain), are precisely the trace you are looking for: And what a racket it has made: from Egypt where this whole thing began around 4000 b.C. the idea of paternity (and its cultural benefits - stability of power, definition of nationality, etc.) swept through the known world and took it by storm.
Many ancient cultures could not full adapt to the new idea and like Carthage, Israel, Crete and Greece, maintained a dual standard (avuncularity). Others, like Egypt and Rome, adopted this new structure completely, and revolutionized the world: the first transformed the polytheistic system to define Egypt as a nation, and Kingship as a power structure (this is the true beginning of history as Kingship always leaves written documentation of itself); the second, many millenia later, transformed polytheism to define the 'state' as a super-ethnic entity (as compared to a nation which is ethnic based), and the republic as a power structure.