Wrong! Prior to 6-9 K years ago humans live in egalitarian tribes and enclaves that were both leaderless and gender equal. There were no kings and queens prior to that time, or even "big men" or chiefs.
If anyone had centrality it was women, as the primary deity was the Divine Ancestress. Just as in hunter-gatherer tribes today, women often provided the bulk of the food that fed the tribe. Cooperative breeding was the norm, as all lineage was matrilineal and the entire tribe/settlement took care of each other as a survival strategy.
Sorry bud, but you just don't have science on your side. I've researched this thoroughly and written about it extensively and what you are clinging to is a patriarchal myth. Anthropologists agree, patriarchy is only 6-9 thousand years old - meaning not just a power imbalance between men and women but any social stratification or class system of any sort.
“Today, most anthropologists would agree, regardless of their stance on issues such as the universality of male dominance, that an entirely different order of male dominance became associated with the rise of the large and populous agricultural states organized in terms of classes. The patriarchal systems that emerged brought women for the first time under the direct control of fathers and husbands with few cross-cutting sources of support. Women as wives under this system were not social adults, and women’s lives were defined in terms of being a wife. Women’s mothering and women’s sexuality came to be seen as requiring protection by fathers and husbands. Protecting unmarried women’s virginity appears to go along with the idea of the domestication of women and an emphasis on a radical dichtomy between the public and the private sphere.”
The excavation of the Anatolian city of Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic community of about 10,000 that was at its peak around 7000 BCE, has yielded further support for the idea that equality and cooperation were ways of life until the recent past.
Çatalhöyük has strong evidence of an egalitarian society, as no houses with distinctive features (belonging to royalty or religious hierarchy, for example) have been found so far. The most recent investigations also reveal little social distinction based on gender, with men and women receiving equivalent nutrition and seeming to have equal social status, as typically found in Paleolithic cultures.
“The three African great apes, with whom we share this rather recent Common Ancestor, are notably hierarchical. Reproductively fortunate are the high-ranking males or females, while those relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy fare less well.
The same can be said of most human political societies in the world today, starting about five thousand years ago. At that time, people were beginning to increasingly live in chiefdoms, societies with highly privileged individuals who occupied hereditary positions of political leadership and social paramountcy. From certain well-developed chiefdoms came the six early civilizations, with their powerful and often despotic leaders. But before twelve-thousand years ago, humans basically were egalitarian (Knauft 1991). They lived in what might be called societies of equals, with minimal political centralization, and no social classes.”
Patriarchy brought about not just stratification between men and women, but rather, an entire class system that had not previously existed. Some men gained wealth and power, but nearly always at the expense of others around them.
"It is this Nordic invasion (rather than the invention of agriculture) that resulted in mankind becoming chained to a system that could build the Pyramids and many other monuments to central authority, far too numerous to count; but could not free the vast majority from lives of poverty and want.
Indo-European Origins of the Flavian System."
A story in New Scientist entitled Why Egalitarian Societies Died Out, has this to say:“
For 5000 years, humans have grown accustomed to living in societies dominated by the privileged few. But it wasn’t always this way. For tens of thousands of years, egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies were widespread. And as a large body of anthropological research shows, long before we organized ourselves into hierarchies of wealth, social status and power, these groups rigorously enforced norms that prevented any individual or group from acquiring more status, authority or resources than others.*
Decision-making was decentralized and leadership ad hoc; there weren’t any chiefs. There were sporadic hot-blooded fights between individuals, of course, but there was no organized conflict between groups. Nor were there strong notions of private property and therefore any need for territorial defense.”
Christopher Boehm is an anthropologist and primatologist who is currently the Director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at University of Southern California. He believes that suppressing our primate ancestors’ dominance hierarchies by enforcing these egalitarian norms was a central adaptation of human evolution. Enhanced cooperation lowered the risks of Paleolithic life for small, isolated bands of humans and was likely crucial to our survival and evolutionary success.
Moreover, the impetus for the development of our much larger and more efficient brain and its use to both make tools and more effectively process and share information was not the bonding between men required to kill. Rather, it was the bonding between mothers and children that is obviously required if human offspring are to survive.
According to this theory, the first human-made artifacts were not weapons. Rather, they were containers to carry food (and infants) as well as tools used by mothers to soften plant food for their children, who needed both mother’s milk and solids to survive.
This theory is more congruent with the fact that primates, as well as the most primitive existing tribes, rely primarily on gathering rather than hunting. It also is congruent with the evidence that meat eating formed only a miniscule part of the diet of ancestral primates, hominids, and early humans.
It is further supported by the fact that primates differ from birds and other species in that typically only mothers share food with their young. Among primates we also see the development of the first tools, not for killing, but for gathering and processing food.
So, as Tanner writes of the still much earlier time that provided the foundation for the Old Society we have examined, “woman the gatherer,” rather than “man the hunter,” seems to have played a most critical role in the evolution of our species.
I could quote you 20 more stories filled with data, quotes from scientists from multiple disciplines, historians, art historians, etc., but I fear I've swamped you with too much truth as it is. Happy reading!
