I think of full-featured pattern matching as a fairly recent addition even to Lisp. Lisp has had some pattern-matching constructs forever of course (cond, destructuring-bind, Norvig's sexp matcher from PAIP [1], etc.). But it's only with the more recent emergence of optima [2] as a de-facto standard that it now has really good pattern matching. It was probably the #1 thing I missed in Lisp, after having used ML a bit, until optima came along.

[1] https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/master/lisp/patmatc...

[2] https://github.com/m2ym/optima

AFAIK pattern-matching is not a historical Lisp feature, it's usually been limited to simple destructuring.

In the modern acception of tree patterns (as opposed to text patterns aka regular expressions), I guess it comes from ML (and possibly prolog but prolog's unification goes even further?): it doesn't look like ISWIM had tree patterns and I can't find older references.

I'd say it's less about Lisp and more that the ML lineage is finally getting its day in the sun (and not before time).