Women in prehistory

Early socialistic thinkers such as Lewis H. Morgan, Friedrich Engels or August Bebel openly equated matrilineality with primitive communism and patrilineality with individualism, oppression, and private property.

[3][5] Similar ideas arose during the second wave of feminism with the increased study of matrilocality and matriarchal religion, such as Marija Gimbutas's theory of a matristic, egalitarian "Old Europe" later outcompeted and conquered by the patriarchal and expansionist Proto-Indo-Europeans.

[6] Such interpretations remain highly controversial due to perceptions of political bias or lack of material evidence,[7] but have been defended by notable figures such as anthropologist Chris Knight, who instead criticized what he saw as ad-hoc functionalist attempts to downplay obvious matrilineal traditions in contemporary tribal societies.

Coined by anthropologists Richard Borshay Lee and Irven DeVore in 1968, it argued, based on evidence now thought to be incomplete, that contemporary foragers displayed a clear division of labor between women and men.

[1] A following study found "that multiple methodological failures all bias their results in the same direction...their analysis does not contradict the wide body of empirical evidence for gendered divisions of labor in foraging societies".

[9] Notable hunter-gatherer groups in recent or contemporary eras known to lack a distinct sexual division of labor include the Ainu,[1] Agta,[10] and Ju/'hoansi,[11] in addition to significant material evidence for female involvement in hunting among prehistoric cultures such as those in what is today Peru.

[18] Lacy and Ocobock stated that burial sites from the Upper Paleolithic did not demonstrate any difference between the grave goods or posthumous treatment afforded to men compared to women, further suggesting a lack of "social hierarchies based on sex".