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The first recorded writer probably was a male, indeed.

That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic.

Actually, my understanding is that the emerging reality is more interesting.

Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal and patriarchal societies only later became the norm with the rise of warlike/raiding and settled agricultural societies which co-evolved and co-depended on higher population densities.

This is certainly the case here in Zomia where uninterrupted matriarchal societies have continued to exist until today, though they are now rapidly disappearing.

However, writing did tend to evolve only after this shift, so your statement may tend toward observational truth despite being based upon fallacious assumption.

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> Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal

We don't know that, and probably will never know. The problem is that those societies left little that we can use to learn about them.

Our main source of information of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is often modern hunter-gatherers, but they are very likely to be different than the ancient ones. Two major differences are (1) the modern ones are in contact with modern societies, and (2) the land they live on is not random, it's land agriculturalists didn't decide to occupy, and has some specific characteristics (mainly that it is poor).

It's also very possible that there isn't a single truth. Hunter-gatherers existed for a long time across a great many locations. They may have had a large variety of cultures.

In support of that, we do have evidence of the opposite of your claim, too: hunter-gatherers that fight wars to capture women, for example.

> Our main source of information of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is often modern hunter-gatherers, but they are very likely to be different than the ancient ones. Two major differences are (1) the modern ones are in contact with modern societies, and (2) the land they live on is not random, it's land agriculturalists didn't decide to occupy, and has some specific characteristics (mainly that it is poor).

There are also a whole bunch we've run into that were largely isolated until recently in Australia and the pacific. How many of them are matriarchal?

> There are also a whole bunch we've run into that were largely isolated until recently in Australia and the pacific. How many of them are matriarchal?

Zero.

Actually, the evidence is still here, and it's us.

Genomic studies are increasingly suggesting an almighty y-bottleneck 20ka ago. One of the things this is consistent with would be a matriarchical society, as females would control reproduction. Couple this with "Venus" figurines scattered across Europe, evidence for societal upheaval ~15ka ago, and a possible and plausible explanation becomes that females were running the show for much of history, being the ones that can bear young (c.f. Animal hierarchies), and males took control recently, possibly in response to encountering other humans (neanderthalis).

Anyway, it's all very patchy and speculative right now, but further genomic studies and archaeology probably can answer this one.

A Y-chromosome bottleneck actually suggest a limited number of males controlled reproduction not females.

Limited number, but not necessarily controlled, and the bottleneck could be symptomatic of a change in control.

You are absolutely right however that it plays both ways - we don't actually yet know enough - but something happened.

We have evidence from other mammals and all other cases a strong Y-chromosome bottleneck is the result of harem male behaviour. If I had to bet I would say the bottleneck was driven by powerful males monopolising females, not females all choosing a small number of males.

Social hierarchies are thought to be one of the innovations of civilization. There is not any evidence of an inherent matriarchy or patriarchy, and there were civilizations that went either way. In fact the strongest theory I've seen argues for a dichotomy of plough vs hoe civilizations: men are better equipped to plough, women are better equipped to hoe. This led to division of labor and social stratification along the lines of sex.

AFAIK, probably all social mammals, including all primates have social hierarchies.

There is an alpha male and an alpha female, and the ranking order under them is quite defined.

One interesting note on primates is that, of the two closest relatives to humans, the social hierarchy seems to falls on both sides of the spectrum. As in: chimpanzees are considered to be more "patriarchal" (read: the alpha male is at the top of the hierarchy), whereas bonobos are considered to be more "matriarchal" (read: mothers are at the top of the hierarchy, although bonobo society is more egalitarian overall than chimpanzee society).

One cannot obviously conclude that much about human society by studying the great apes. However, just by this I honestly think it's safe to say that the author's statement was made in haste. Without evidence, it's hard to tell what the social structure was 30,000 years ago is without making some (in my opinion) shaky assumptions.

(This does not justify the poison in the comment section of that article though.)

I don't know if this applies to humans. Do you have a source for your claims, or for a similar claim about humanity?

It seems obvious to me that we do a variant of this, but I don't have any scientific text to refer to.

Pity.

In fact the strongest theory I've seen argues for a dichotomy of plough vs hoe civilizations: men are better equipped to plough, women are better equipped to hoe.

Whether accurate or not, this emphasizes that there are very small and often unintended details in society that give power to one gender or another.

> Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were primarily matriarchal and patriarchal societies only later became the norm with the rise of warlike/raiding and settled agricultural societies which co-evolved and co-depended on higher population densities.

Okay. Are hunter-gatherers or agricultural societies more likely to have left written records that survive until today?

You claimed that "most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic". I don't think the current evidence suggests this, unless by "ancient societies" you meant something like "ancient civilizations". I would define the term "ancient societies" as inclusive of pre-agricultural (hunter-gatherer) societies, and then one has to make a distinction. The established view is indeed that ancient hunter-gatherer societies were much more egalitarian than ancient agricultural societies. Exactly which features of agriculture led to the development of (more?) patriarchy is surely still being debated, though.

I agree it would've been even more clear if I used "civilization" instead of "society". Fair point, as more precise language is usually preferable.

Are you saying the main point / logic of my post wasn't clear? It wasn't feasible to consider replacing this one word and evaluate the likely intent? This feels like you're being a bit nitpicky and pedantic.

Still, your point stands. I hope you can concede my point here too...

Yes, I was of course nitpicking. The only reason I did so is that others in this thread already seemed to be commenting based on that interpretation of your post, and in the followup comments you all seemed to be talking past each other. I don't disagree with the content of your original post in general.

> Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal and patriarchal societies ...

i.e. unorganized societies are largely egalitarian, and small.

Organized societies are not egalitarian, but are larger than unorganized ones. Organized societies tend to treat the leaders better than the masses (go figure). And the leaders are the ones who win the leadership competitions.

There is no intrinsic "male" preference here. No "patriarchal" society promotes men simply for being men. Simple math shows this to be true.

The leaders of a "patriarchal" society are perhaps 10%? Maybe 1% of the population. Yet 50% of the population is male. i.e. At least 80% of the male population had limited status, and limited power.

We only call these societies "patriarchal" because we concentrate on the leaders. Everyone wants to be rich and powerful. No one wants to be a 16 year-old boy who's conscripted into an army, and then forced to die of starvation or illness in a foreign land, due to the whim of a king.

The problem you are addressing is part of an ideology called "intersectional feminism": the idea that all interactions between two individuals are also interactions between whatever buckets the two individuals fall into -- men and women, whites and blacks, heteros and homos, cis and trans, and so on.

By that reasoning a man in Western culture is inherently privileged over a woman simply because men in general are typically privileged over women in general. This leads to redefining sexism as "sexism from a position of power" (because arguably sexism without power is "harmless") and "power" is then often treated as a synonym for "privilege".

And this is how you end up with Hillary Clinton (a woman with significant wealth and political power) being less privileged than a male salaried worker simply by association.

Note that this idea isn't inherently discriminatory against men (or whites or whatever) either -- if the balances were different it'd be equally unfair.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYpELqKZ02Q

>Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal and patriarchal societies only later became the norm with the rise of warlike/raiding and settled agricultural societies which co-evolved and co-depended on higher population densities.

I think that is unlikely, especially if the support of the entire social dynamic changing is the introduction of warlike/raiding and higher population densities.

For example, there are ~5,500 species of mammals, and only 3 species of mammals have female dominated social hierarchies, and the theory on those is evolutionary not social. Therefore, your statement would make humans only the 4th mammal having a female dominated society and the only species to change the power dynamic for social reasons. I can't refute there are and have been matriarchal societies as you mention, but like the mammal population that would be the exception not the rule.

Non-patriarchal != matriarchal. (I had originally written matriarchal but changed the comment quickly as I realised had conflated multiple possible prior scenarios)

In any event, humans are a known special case for lots of other stuff, as we have advanced cognitive function and predispositions to social reasoning and inter-generational cultural preservation, so to my mind your statistical argument is obtuse at best.

>so to my mind your statistical argument is obtuse at best.

Well I included statistics, but as I note gender domination is evolutionary in mammals. Evolutionary arguments != statistical arguments.

>Non-patriarchal != matriarchal

Correct me if I am wrong, because I did interpret non-patriarchal to mean matriarchal, so I am left assuming what you meant by non-patriarchal is no gender domination pre-agriculture, is that right? If not, what does that mean, I tried googling it and I get the wiki article for matriarchy.

If you meant no gender domination, that would make humans the only mammal to evolve to not have a gender dominate hierarchy. Moreover, since other mammals all evolved to have gender dominated hierarchies and since they don't have the fancy cognitive functions we have, wouldn't it be safe to say like all other mammals, we evolved and developed a gender dominate social structure first and then higher brain functions? Moreover, if primates evolved to have gender dominated hierarchies and modern humans have gender dominate hierarchies (even with our superior brains), then why would we not have had a gender dominate hierarchy until the advent of agriculture?

What evidence is there of matriarchy, and how is that defined? I think you're right that today a popular theory among anthropologists is that agriculture led to many inequalities, but like all things ancient, there just isn't much data for anthropologists to draw conclusions from.

Well, if you think about it from a reductionist perspective, in non-monogamous societies children were by definition primarily socially familiar with their mothers, because they were the only family actually known.

Evidence of matriarchy includes living matriarchal societies (eg. the Mosuo people). I am no expert, though. If you look at Wikipedia's matriarchy page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy#Asia I actually live in Yunnan, which is smack bang in the middle of all of the Asian examples.

What do you mean? what makes you think there is any distinction between family and community outside of incest taboos, which may not have even existed in prehistory? What does an identification of a mother as family have to do with matriarchies? You haven't even made an argument.

> what evidence

Archaeological evidence

Evidence from literate civilizations writing about their uncivilized neighbors, which goes back to the earliest known works

Evidence from writers encountering such societies up to the modern day, although they're almost extinct outside of the deep Amazon and the like.

Logical conclusions - without a food surplus, there is no class system and other results

> Logical conclusions - without a food surplus, there is no class system and other results

Even hunter-gatherers have chiefs and elders.

> Even hunter-gatherers have chiefs and elders.

Hunter-gatherer bands do not have chiefs. Looking at the Wikipedia article for "Tribal chief" it says "Historically, tribal societies represent an intermediate stage between the band society of the Paleolithic stage and civilization with centralized, super-regional government based in cities." I couldn't put it better.

Even with regards to Indian chiefs, and it's not hard to see how there are misconceptions about them if they're still referred to as "Indians", modern anthropology acknowledges that European notions about Indian bands and tribes in the 15th and 16th century were often wrong. Europeans saw parallels of European society in the New World which weren't there (of course there were different kinds of societies in the Americas, from Montezuma's Aztec empire, to humter gatherer bands).

To be fair, you don't have to refer to them as "Indians". Most serious academic anthropologists would refrain from doing so, preferring Native American instead. So to label them as "Indians" yourself and then to state that "it's not hard to see how there are misconceptions about them if they're still referred to as 'Indians'" is a bit disingenuous. I'm sure there are misconceptions but I don't take as evidence the fact that you chose to call them "Indians".

I said they're still referred to as Indians because they're still referred to as Indians. The point is the very name shows the nature of the ingrained misconceptions about them - the idea that they're from India for one. Yes, I know they're not from India, you seem to have missed the point.

>Logical conclusions - without a food surplus, there is no class system and other results

That would make humans the only mammal out of ~5,500 species to not have a social hierarchy and those other species didn't develop hierarchies because they had a surplus of food.

> agriculture led to many inequalities

Given the starkly different physical strengths between the genders, it's hard to believe that gender roles did not exist before agriculture.

Pre-agricultural societies certainly had a clear division of labor between the genders, but could still have had a high degree of equality in the sense that both women and men had roughly equal power in the communal decision-making.

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