🔗 Share this article

One widespread belief claims that in certain bygone periods of human history, females enjoyed equal standing to men, or perhaps ruled, leading to more harmonious and more peaceful societies. Subsequently, male-dominated systems arose, ushering in ages of conflict and subjugation.

The Roots of the Gender System Debate

This concept of female-led societies and male-led societies as polar opposites—following a decisive switch between them—was seeded in the 1800s through Marxist theory, entering archaeology despite little evidence. Thereafter, it spread into public consciousness.

Social scientists, however, were often less convinced. They observed significant diversity in sex roles across human societies, both modern and past ones, and some theorized that this variety was the standard in ancient times too. Proving this was difficult, in part because identifying biological sex—not to mention gender—was often hard in ancient remains. But around two decades back, that shifted.

The Breakthrough in Ancient DNA

This so-called ancient DNA revolution—the ability to recover DNA from old remains and study it—meant that suddenly it became possible to identify the sex of long-dead individuals and to trace their kinship ties. The chemical makeup of their bones and teeth—particularly, the ratio of elemental variants found there—indicated whether they had resided in various locations and experienced shifts in nutrition. The picture emerging thanks to these advanced methods shows that variety in sex roles was very much the norm in prehistory, and that there was not a definite turning point when one system gave way to its opposite.

Hypotheses on the Emergence of Male-Dominant Systems

The Marxist idea, in fact attributed to Marx’s collaborator, proposed that early societies were egalitarian until farming spread from the Middle East about ten millennia back. Accompanying the settled way of life and building up of wealth that farming introduced arose the need to protect that wealth and to set rules for its inheritance. As communities expanded, men took over the elites that formed to manage these matters, partly because they were more skilled at fighting, and wealth gravitated to the male line. Male kin were additionally more likely to remain in place, with their wives relocating to join them. Women’s subordination was frequently a byproduct of these shifts.

An alternative view, put forward by archaeologist a Lithuanian scholar in the 1960s, was that female-oriented societies prevailed for an extended period in the continent—up to 5,000 years ago—after which they were overthrown by incoming, patriarchal nomads from the steppe.

Evidence of Matrilineal Societies

Matrilinearity (where property passes down the mother’s side) and matrilocality (where female kin stay together) frequently go together, and each are linked with greater female status and influence. In 2017, U.S. scientists reported that for over three centuries during the 10th century, an elite mother-line group lived in a canyon site, in modern-day the southwestern U.S.. Then, in a recent study, Asian researchers identified a matrilineal agricultural community that thrived for a comparable duration in eastern China, over three millennia prior. Such discoveries add to previous evidence, suggesting that matrilineal societies have been present on every populated continents, at least from the advent of farming on.

Power and Autonomy in Ancient Societies

However, even if they enjoy greater status, females in mother-line societies don’t necessarily make decisions. That typically remains the domain of men—just of women’s brothers rather than their husbands. And because old genetic material and isotopes can’t tell you a great deal about female agency, sex-based hierarchies in prehistory remain a subject of discussion. In fact, this line of work has forced scholars to consider what they understand by power. Suppose the wife of a male ruler shaped his court through patronage and back channels, and his decisions through counselling, did she hold less influence than him?

Archaeologists know of several examples of couples sharing power in the bronze age—the era after those nomads arrived in Europe—and later historical records attest to elite women shaping decisions in such ways, continents apart. Maybe they did so in earlier times. Females exerting soft power in male-dominated societies could have predated Homo sapiens. In his recent publication about sex and gender, a titled work, primatologist a noted scientist recounted how an alpha female chimp, Mama, chose a successor to the top male—her superior—with a gesture.

Elements Influencing Sex Roles

In recent years another aspect has become clear. While Engels may have been generally correct in associating wealth with male-line inheritance, additional elements affected gender relations, too—including how a community makes a living. Recently, Chinese and British researchers found that traditionally matrilineal villages in Tibet have become more gender-neutral over the last 70 years, as they moved from an agricultural economy to a trade-focused one. Struggle also plays its part. Although female-resident and male-resident societies are equally warlike, says researcher Carol Ember, internal strife—rather than battles against an external enemy—pushes societies towards male residence, because fighting groups prefer to keep their male offspring nearby.

Women as Warriors and Leaders

At the same time, evidence is accumulating that women engaged in combat, hunted and served as shamans in the distant past. Not a single position or role has been closed to them in all times and places. And even if women leaders may have been rare, they were not nonexistent. New ancient DNA findings from an Irish university demonstrate that there were at least pockets of female-line descent throughout Britain, when Celtic tribes dominated the land in the iron age. Combined with archaeological evidence for women fighters and Roman accounts of women leaders, it appears as if Celtic women could wield hard as well as indirect authority.

Modern Matrilineal Societies

Mother-line societies persist nowadays—a Chinese group are one case, as are the Hopi of Arizona, heirs of those ancient clans. Their numbers are declining, as state authorities assert their male-dominant muscles, but they act as testaments that some extinct societies tilted more towards gender equality than numerous of our present-day ones, and that every culture have the potential to change.