The quotes are from the stories, which have been linked, which are in turn taken from scientific journals and the like. We aren't lions, or even gorillas.
"Unlike what you may have been led to believe, this is how our Paleolithic ancestors survived — by all taking care of each other. Men did not “provide” for their mate in the way that we think of that term, because everyone contributed to the food for the tribe, which typically consisted of 20–50 individuals. The group made sure that everyone had something to eat, regardless of their own food acquisition success on any particular day. “Cooperation and especially food sharing are essential for survival in a hunting-and-gathering economy,” (anthropologist Mark) Dyble said. “The proverb that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ is certainly true for hunter-gatherers who, without food sharing to mitigate the day-to-day shortfalls in foraging, could simply not survive.” (1)
Comparisons to other primates are especially persuasive. Like humans, our closest cousins, chimps and bonobos, have testes on the outside (though theirs are bigger), and male animals are typically 10 to 15 percent larger than females. Gorillas, though, like more distant cousins on steroids, have small penises (balls on the inside), and males that are twice as big as females. Because gorillas mate polygynously (multiple ladies for each dude), males must be imposing to win access to females (specifically, their vaginas). But for chimps and bonobos, “multimale-multifemale” maters, the battle is on the inside — large volumes of sperm fight to the egg, even leaving traps for competitors. Our genital similarities to chimps and bonobos thus reveal our promiscuous past. (5)"
Actually, patriarchy spread because it was so disruptive, not because it was a better system. It arose in conjunction with a greater need for hierarchy and control due to agriculture,
"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."
The question is not whether we can return to the type of societies that ancient hunter-gatherers had. Physical strength is not and has never had a direct correlation to genetic success. Survival of the fittest means who is the most able to adapt to the current conditions. Sometimes that has strength as a factor, but in other primates, the alpha is the one who can create the best coalition, not who is the strongest. It’s a patriarchal fallacy that this is a universal indicator of genetic fitness.
The question is can we hone our cultures to be less based around patriarchal dominance hierarchies and more around cooperative partnership-oriented endeavors?
"In slower moving and less complex business environments the old hierarchical model that depended mostly on only a few people at the top for leadership simply doesn’t work anymore. In today’s more volatile, uncertain and ambiguous business battlefield, decentralized controls and leadership through networks of people at all levels is imperative for success." Forbes
We’ve been sold a bill of goods, which is essentially patriarchy justifying itself. Current science indicates this really just isn’t the case. I’ve been studying this and writing about it for the past 3 years or so, and I see no real evidence of anything other than that. The question of how to interrupt a 9,000-year-old system is a good one, but it’s already taking place in many places around the world, including some industrialized countries such as Denmark, and in a lot of business arenas where agility is prioritized (over cumbersome hierarchy). That doesn’t mean that it will be easy to dismantle but there is hope.
“In other words, these behaviors are a learned part of a particular culture — one that is entirely different from what I’ve experienced in more sex-positive spaces. This means it is not natural, justifiable, or inevitable. America could transform its predatory, patriarchal indoctrination of boys and men if it really wanted to. Women and non-gender conforming people could be safe out in the world if we ever decided to make that a priority and get serious about it.”
