Modern forager societies are still egalitarian - vehemently so, and the group enforces that so that no one person/man gets too many ideas about being the leader or about hoarding food. Christopher Bohm, the head of the Jane Goodall Center, believes that suppressing our primate ancestors dominance hierarchies was a central element of human evolution.
"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.
“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.
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."
Patriarchy is indeed an abberation - a social system based in a dominance hierarchy that has only been around for a few thousand years. This is my area of expertise and I've written extensively about it, so if you want to the rest of your questions responded to, you're going to have to read the stories I've already written.
