Patriarchy Really Is Only 6–9 Thousand Years Old

It isn’t the way things have always been, as you may have been led to believe

There’s a very strongly held cultural narrative that says we’ve always lived in male-dominated and highly stratified societies. After all, didn’t prehistoric hunters have to go out and bring home some meat back to the cave to feed their wives and kids? Didn’t those same men have to protect them from saber tooth tigers? Weren’t Paleolithic hunter-gatherer tribes ruled by a chief? I mean who else was going to lead the raiding party of the next tribe or organize protection against them? Right? Everyone knows this. The only problem is, none of it is true.

We’ve pretty much all grown up believing that early life was a lot like now — just without the modern conveniences — because it’s the story we’ve been told, but that story is simply patriarchy essentially trying to justifying itself by claiming to be timeless and inevitable. It has no basis in reality. The truth that modern archeology, anthropology, primatology, art history, and other science tells us is a very different one. Not only is male primacy and power over women a very recent thing, but the social stratification and class system that are also an integral part of patriarchy are brand new as well. A few thousand years ago, it simply didn’t exist.

Let me say this one more time for emphasis because most people think of the term patriarchy as referring solely to a historical power differential between men and women. That is certainly one aspect, but the other central element that emerged at the same time as this gender stratification was a broader social and class stratification that had also never existed before.

Up until about 6–9 thousand years ago, nearly all humans lived in leaderless egalitarian enclaves. There likely were gender roles, but as is the case with many current hunter-gatherer tribes, those aren’t necessarily strictly adhered to. If a woman wants to hunt, she does. If a man wants to gather or help care for children, he does. Modern hunter-gatherer tribes give us insight into this, but archeology supports it as well.

The !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert (the exclamation point stands for a clicking sound) demonstrate a sexual egalitarianism that one wouldn’t necessarily expect from a nomadic tribe. While men tend to hunt and women tend to gather, these roles often overlap. Women retain control over the food they gather. Both men and women raise children equally. Studies on other contemporary hunter-gatherer societies show a similar degree of sexual equality.

Archaeologist Randall Haas of the University of California, Davis and colleagues reported in the November 4, 2020 Science Advances that they believe female big-game hunters were common in the ancient Americas. “Haas’ new findings coincide with recent evidence that warrior women existed around 5,000 years ago in California and roughly 1,500 years ago in Mongolia (SN: 4/27/20) — and perhaps about 1,000 years ago among Scandinavian Vikings (SN: 9/13/17).”

Learning that early humans were highly egalitarian surprises many people, but because the evidence is so complete and overwhelming, most usually come to accept it as fact. For some others, the very suggestion that the story they’ve always believed in is not true enrages them. I encounter these angry, defensive guys rather frequently since I often write stories that dispel old myths about gender. They are so sure that the world has always been this way that they just can’t wrap their heads around the science that indicates that it has not. But for those who are open to the true picture, here is a brief look at some of the details.

Let’s go back and deconstruct the first paragraph. I’ve already talked about how at least in some cases, both women and men hunted animals, but even beyond that, for many Paleolithic tribes, meat was a small portion of their diet, depending on where they lived. Gatherers provided much of the sustenance to the tribe, just as they do in many contemporary tribes.

The whole dynamic of a male provider for a nuclear family is a pretty recent one, beginning with plowed agriculture and intensifying with the Industrial Revolution. Prior to patriarchy and dry agriculture (that which needs to be irrigated), both men and women contributed to the food supplies and the wellbeing of the family because until that time humans lived in small hunter-gatherer bands or larger egalitarian proto-agricultural settlements where the survival strategy was for the entire group was to feed and look out for each other. In some current hunter-gatherer bands, it is still actually the gatherers who provide most of what the tribe eats. Paternity is not only unknowable without the coercive control of women that only arose with patriarchy, but it is unimportant. Everyone looks out for the well-being of the entire group.

“Because few people study ‘deep history,’ i.e., anything before the rise of Greece and Rome, most are unaware that it was only in one type of agrarian society, for less than 3 percent of Homo sapiens history, that women were unimportant as primary producers, adding little to their family’s subsistence,” sociologist Rae Blumber writes.

(For a more in-depth look at how plowed agriculture led to gender inequality, read my story The Trope of the Farmer’s Daughter.)

Çatalhöyük was a large proto-agricultural settlement in the Fertile Crescent that flourished from approximately 7100 BCE to 5700 BCE. At its height, the population numbered around 10,000, with all evidence that the inhabitants lived a very peaceful and egalitarian existence. We know this is the case because Çatalhöyük is one of the most thoroughly excavated archeological sites in the world.

The settlement was on a wide and open plain on either side of a river, with no defensive properties and although they were the first to smelt ore to make lead, no thrusting weapons have been found. In other words, this large settlement existed for over two thousand years without defensive capabilities or weapons that could have been used to fight off invaders. This would hardly have been possible if warfare or raiding were a common part of life.

Cooperation and enforced egalitarianism were survival strategies that allowed Paleolithic and early Neolithic groups to survive. They had low population density, ample natural resources, and relied on neighboring groups to trade members in order to maintain genetic diversity and prevent inbreeding. Not only would there have been no reason to kill each other but the social environment was one designed to keep any impulse for widescale violence in check. There is also little evidence of mass killing before about 8,000 years ago.

(For more about this read, Our Ancient Ancestors Had No Need of War.)

This type of egalitarianism is a purposeful and intentional survival strategy. It need not take place out of pure hearts or through being “noble savages.” Even today, hunter-gatherer bands maintain this sort of forced egalitarianism by a sort of reverse hierarchy. “Generally, individuals who attempt to assert dominance or establish a leadership position are ridiculed and ostracized. From what we can tell, these practices hold true for ancient hunter-gatherers as well.”

(For more about this read my story, Yes, Our Ancient Ancestors Were Egalitarian.)

Larger proto-agricultural settlements such as Çatalhöyük were peaceful, egalitarian, gender-equal, leaderless, and cooperative. We know this due to 60 years of intensive study of the site. This culture was not a lone outlier in an otherwise warlike and stratified world. Rather, it was a snapshot of what the world had been like until such time as increasing population density as well as greater personal property that came with a larger reliance on agriculture combined with natural disasters and incursions from more warlike Proto-Indo-European tribes to change the social dynamics forever.

“Labor roles became more gendered as well. Generally, men did the majority of the fieldwork while women were relegated to child-rearing and household work. Without contributing food (and by association, without control over it), women became second-class citizens. Women also had babies more frequently, on average once every two years rather than once every four in hunter-gatherer societies.

Because somebody had to have control over surplus food, it became necessary to divide society into roles that supported this hierarchy. The roles of an administrator, a servant, a priest, and a soldier were invented. The soldier was especially important because agriculture was so unsustainable compared to hunting and gathering. The fickleness of agriculture ironically encouraged more migration into neighboring lands in search of more resources and warfare with neighboring groups. Capturing slaves was also important since farming was hard work, and more people were working in these new roles.

This division of labor and social inequality had very real consequences. For instance, while the majority of people had disastrous health compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, the skeletons of Mycenean royalty had better teeth and were three inches taller than their subjects. Chilean mummies from A.D. 1000 had a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease than commoners.”

Patriarchy is the social system that followed the millennia of peaceful egalitarianism that had come before it. “According to cultural anthropologist and ethnographer Raymond C. Kelly, the earliest hunter-gatherer societies of Homo erectus population density was probably low enough to avoid armed conflict. The development of the throwing-spear, together with ambush hunting techniques, made potential violence between hunting parties very costly, dictating cooperation and maintenance of low population densities to prevent competition for resources. This behavior may have accelerated the migration out of Africa of H. Erectus some 1.8 million years ago as a natural consequence of conflict avoidance.”

Because these were such a group-oriented societies, the notion of nuclear families doesn’t really make sense. As John Odling-Smee points out in his review of noted sociobiologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s book Mothers and Others, “Homo sapiens could never have evolved if human mothers had been required to raise their offspring on their own. Human infants are too helpless and too expensive in their demands for care and resources. So human females have to line up helpers — sometimes extending beyond their own kin — to raise their young. That requires both males and females to invest heavily in social skills for bargaining with other members of their groups. Hrdy suggests that females in ancestral hunting and gathering groups may have thrived because they were free to be flexible in this way. Female flexibility was reduced when humans established settlements requiring male coalitions to defend them, probably leading to greater control of females by males… The most refreshing aspect of [this] book is the challenge [it] offers to what we thought we already knew.”

So let’s review what life was like pre-patriarchy:

• Cooperative living rather than nuclear families that were headed by a male provider
• Gender equity, with no social or sexual control of women
• Socially enforced egalitarianism to keep aggression down and cooperation functioning
• Low population density, ample natural resources, and few personal possessions
• High cost of engaging in needless violence
• No social stratification, including no permanent leaders.

Despite the classic sociobiological view of an ancient nuclear family, with a father off hunting big game and a mother tending the cave and the kids, current science simply doesn’t support this. Fossil evidence, endocrinology, psychology, history, child development, genetics, comparative primatology, and field research among contemporary hunter-gatherer societies have painted a very different picture — one that only began to change around 6–9 thousand years ago.

It is only with the rise of agriculture, as well as incursions from war-like northern tribes, that we begin to see not only social and sexual control of women but also class stratification and elites for the first time. Agriculture is in many ways a much more difficult life than hunting and gathering, although it also allowed the population to explode. Once the genie was out of the bottle, there was no going back.

Patriarchy spread because it was destabilizing. “Egalitarian populations are eventually able to stabilize, not because of density-dependent growth but because fertility, mortality, and resource productivity achieve a balance.” Counterintuitively, the fact that when inequality arose it was so destabilizing caused these patriarchal societies to spread by creating an incentive to migrate in search of further resources.

Even former Trump strategist Steve Bannon inadvertently acknowledged that patriarchy was a rather recent development when he opined that the #MeToo movement would lead to unimaginable shifts in our culture. “The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo 10,000 years of recorded history,” Bannon said.

Agriculture and the patriarchal dominance hierarchies that came with it allowed what we would call civilization to be built, but it also ushered in a time of social stratification that we have never recovered from. Although we can never return to the hunter-gather lifestyle en masse, the fact that inequality is such a recent human development gives me hope that we can find our way towards greater egalitarianism. After all, we’ve only had inequality for 3% of human history. Surely there are things we can learn from our pre-patriarchal ancestors about how to take better care of each other. I think that accepting that patriarchy is not timeless and inevitable is a good place to start.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2021 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.