In 1971, the Database Task Group, presented the formalisation of a standard to approaches used at the time, CODASYL (1959), in the formation of... COBOL.

There is no query primitives in the CODASYL Data Model. Only a Data Manipulation Language.

Because "relational" databases didn't really happen until the early '80s - nearly a decade later. (SQL came directly out of work on CODASYL).

We had a Database Task Group, long, long, before we had the concept of a query primitive.