We don't know that, and probably will never know. The problem is that those societies left little that we can use to learn about them.
Our main source of information of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is often modern hunter-gatherers, but they are very likely to be different than the ancient ones. Two major differences are (1) the modern ones are in contact with modern societies, and (2) the land they live on is not random, it's land agriculturalists didn't decide to occupy, and has some specific characteristics (mainly that it is poor).
It's also very possible that there isn't a single truth. Hunter-gatherers existed for a long time across a great many locations. They may have had a large variety of cultures.
In support of that, we do have evidence of the opposite of your claim, too: hunter-gatherers that fight wars to capture women, for example.
There are also a whole bunch we've run into that were largely isolated until recently in Australia and the pacific. How many of them are matriarchal?
Zero.
Genomic studies are increasingly suggesting an almighty y-bottleneck 20ka ago. One of the things this is consistent with would be a matriarchical society, as females would control reproduction. Couple this with "Venus" figurines scattered across Europe, evidence for societal upheaval ~15ka ago, and a possible and plausible explanation becomes that females were running the show for much of history, being the ones that can bear young (c.f. Animal hierarchies), and males took control recently, possibly in response to encountering other humans (neanderthalis).
Anyway, it's all very patchy and speculative right now, but further genomic studies and archaeology probably can answer this one.
You are absolutely right however that it plays both ways - we don't actually yet know enough - but something happened.
There is an alpha male and an alpha female, and the ranking order under them is quite defined.
One cannot obviously conclude that much about human society by studying the great apes. However, just by this I honestly think it's safe to say that the author's statement was made in haste. Without evidence, it's hard to tell what the social structure was 30,000 years ago is without making some (in my opinion) shaky assumptions.
(This does not justify the poison in the comment section of that article though.)
Whether accurate or not, this emphasizes that there are very small and often unintended details in society that give power to one gender or another.
Okay. Are hunter-gatherers or agricultural societies more likely to have left written records that survive until today?
Are you saying the main point / logic of my post wasn't clear? It wasn't feasible to consider replacing this one word and evaluate the likely intent? This feels like you're being a bit nitpicky and pedantic.
Still, your point stands. I hope you can concede my point here too...
i.e. unorganized societies are largely egalitarian, and small.
Organized societies are not egalitarian, but are larger than unorganized ones. Organized societies tend to treat the leaders better than the masses (go figure). And the leaders are the ones who win the leadership competitions.
There is no intrinsic "male" preference here. No "patriarchal" society promotes men simply for being men. Simple math shows this to be true.
The leaders of a "patriarchal" society are perhaps 10%? Maybe 1% of the population. Yet 50% of the population is male. i.e. At least 80% of the male population had limited status, and limited power.
We only call these societies "patriarchal" because we concentrate on the leaders. Everyone wants to be rich and powerful. No one wants to be a 16 year-old boy who's conscripted into an army, and then forced to die of starvation or illness in a foreign land, due to the whim of a king.
By that reasoning a man in Western culture is inherently privileged over a woman simply because men in general are typically privileged over women in general. This leads to redefining sexism as "sexism from a position of power" (because arguably sexism without power is "harmless") and "power" is then often treated as a synonym for "privilege".
And this is how you end up with Hillary Clinton (a woman with significant wealth and political power) being less privileged than a male salaried worker simply by association.
Note that this idea isn't inherently discriminatory against men (or whites or whatever) either -- if the balances were different it'd be equally unfair.
I think that is unlikely, especially if the support of the entire social dynamic changing is the introduction of warlike/raiding and higher population densities.
For example, there are ~5,500 species of mammals, and only 3 species of mammals have female dominated social hierarchies, and the theory on those is evolutionary not social. Therefore, your statement would make humans only the 4th mammal having a female dominated society and the only species to change the power dynamic for social reasons. I can't refute there are and have been matriarchal societies as you mention, but like the mammal population that would be the exception not the rule.
In any event, humans are a known special case for lots of other stuff, as we have advanced cognitive function and predispositions to social reasoning and inter-generational cultural preservation, so to my mind your statistical argument is obtuse at best.
Well I included statistics, but as I note gender domination is evolutionary in mammals. Evolutionary arguments != statistical arguments.
>Non-patriarchal != matriarchal
Correct me if I am wrong, because I did interpret non-patriarchal to mean matriarchal, so I am left assuming what you meant by non-patriarchal is no gender domination pre-agriculture, is that right? If not, what does that mean, I tried googling it and I get the wiki article for matriarchy.
If you meant no gender domination, that would make humans the only mammal to evolve to not have a gender dominate hierarchy. Moreover, since other mammals all evolved to have gender dominated hierarchies and since they don't have the fancy cognitive functions we have, wouldn't it be safe to say like all other mammals, we evolved and developed a gender dominate social structure first and then higher brain functions? Moreover, if primates evolved to have gender dominated hierarchies and modern humans have gender dominate hierarchies (even with our superior brains), then why would we not have had a gender dominate hierarchy until the advent of agriculture?
Given the starkly different physical strengths between the genders, it's hard to believe that gender roles did not exist before agriculture.
Evidence of matriarchy includes living matriarchal societies (eg. the Mosuo people). I am no expert, though. If you look at Wikipedia's matriarchy page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy#Asia I actually live in Yunnan, which is smack bang in the middle of all of the Asian examples.
Archaeological evidence
Evidence from literate civilizations writing about their uncivilized neighbors, which goes back to the earliest known works
Evidence from writers encountering such societies up to the modern day, although they're almost extinct outside of the deep Amazon and the like.
Logical conclusions - without a food surplus, there is no class system and other results
That would make humans the only mammal out of ~5,500 species to not have a social hierarchy and those other species didn't develop hierarchies because they had a surplus of food.
Even hunter-gatherers have chiefs and elders.
Hunter-gatherer bands do not have chiefs. Looking at the Wikipedia article for "Tribal chief" it says "Historically, tribal societies represent an intermediate stage between the band society of the Paleolithic stage and civilization with centralized, super-regional government based in cities." I couldn't put it better.
Even with regards to Indian chiefs, and it's not hard to see how there are misconceptions about them if they're still referred to as "Indians", modern anthropology acknowledges that European notions about Indian bands and tribes in the 15th and 16th century were often wrong. Europeans saw parallels of European society in the New World which weren't there (of course there were different kinds of societies in the Americas, from Montezuma's Aztec empire, to humter gatherer bands).
That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic.
Actually, my understanding is that the emerging reality is more interesting.
Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal and patriarchal societies only later became the norm with the rise of warlike/raiding and settled agricultural societies which co-evolved and co-depended on higher population densities.
This is certainly the case here in Zomia where uninterrupted matriarchal societies have continued to exist until today, though they are now rapidly disappearing.
However, writing did tend to evolve only after this shift, so your statement may tend toward observational truth despite being based upon fallacious assumption.