Empire of the Southern Moon is a great book, but it takes place in the 17th and 18th centuries. It's hardly relevant here. Native Americans began cultivating crops about 4,000 years ago. Ergo, they were no longer foragers (hunter-gatherers). Same goes for Polynesians. I finally had the chance to do some looking. In other words, all the anthropolgists and other scientists I've been quoting you from are not "myths." It's mighty condescending to act like this is something I've cooked up and to call it "your premise" in the face of all the science that I've already linked to you, particularly when you are trying to refute it with stuff that took place thousands of years later. As I've already said, this is well established anthropological fact. Precontact is not the metric. Pre-agriculture is. That's when our social structures changed.
Have you read any of the stories I've already linked you, includig the one from the World Economic Forum? I'll put it here again for your convenience.
As I've already excerpted to you from that article (and in The Trope of the Farmer's Daughter), the agricultural revolution is the time when small forager bands settled down more to farm, which completely changed the social structure from a highly egalitarian one to a patriarchal dominance hierarchy, which is a socially stratified culture in more ways than just a gender power differential. I've written dozens of stories about that already so not going into that further here.
Up through the Neolithic period, when early agricultural settlements like Çatalhöyük were flourishing, enforced egalitarianism was still the norm. It wasn’t until near the end of the settlement’s existence that more hierarchical societal mechanisms are in evidence. Ian Hodder, who leads the Çatalhöyük Research Project believes that it was a highly developed system of beliefs and rituals that helped the society be cohesive in the absence of leaders.
Dr. Peter Gray sums it up nicely: “There are some variations from culture to culture, of course, and not all of the cultures are quite as peaceful and fully egalitarian as others, but the generalities are the same. One anthropologist after another has been amazed by the degree of equality, individual autonomy, indulgent treatment of children, cooperation, and sharing in the hunter-gatherer culture that he or she studied. When you read about “warlike primitive tribes,” or about indigenous people who held slaves, or about tribal cultures with gross inequalities between men and women, you are not reading about band hunter-gatherers.”
We know about the lives of our ancient ancestors, not just because of the social systems of modern hunter-gatherers, but also through what the archeology and ancient anthropological study of those societies tells us. We can study tools, and the absence of weapons, as well as cave art, and later on, pottery and other artistic works that depict their way of life. We can study the places where early humans settled, once they did stop roaming and what the properties were of not just the land (open plains vs. a defensive spot on a hill) but also the dwellings themselves and what they contained.
Before the sexual and social control of women that came into being for the first time with patriarchy, about 6-9 thousand years ago, there was no way to verify who the father of a child was, so all lineage went through the mother. In a culture where everyone takes care of everyone else as a survival strategy, it hardly matters, since there is no such thing as "a provider." Women often contributed more to the food of the tribe, as they still do in many forager societies today, and food sharing is still an integral part of those cultures.
You have completely bought into a historical outlook that is unsupported by science. I don't blame you for that since it's the one that patriarchy has been peddling to continue to justify itself, but it's not true. And again, I mean patriarchy as the antithesis of egalitarianism, not just in the gender sense, but in the larger social structure of a dominance based hierarchy. Read this, for more about that.
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.”
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.
I think you've got enough reading to keep you busy for a while. Let me know if you want more. I've written probably 30-40 stories about all of this over the past 3 years. I have plenty more I can link to you.
