Although I didn't comment on this straight away I found it fascinating. I am just reading a book by Steve Taylor called The Fall, described thus:

"Is it not 'natural' for human beings to kill each other, for men to oppress women, for individuals to accumulate massive wealth and power, or to abuse nature. The roots of our current malaise lie in an 'ego explosion' which occurred several thousand years ago. "Primitive", pre-civilisation men and women were largely free of social ills and had a more unified and harmonious state of being than us."

I am only in the early chapters but the author points out that until around 4000BCE 'hunter-gatherer' communities were thought to be 'matrist' and woman had an equally (if not more so) important place as men, within the tribe/clan.

This can be pulled apart in many ways mainly on the basis of 'where's the evidence' but the female figurines that have been found seem to corrorbate the importance of the female up until around 6000 years ago when 'civilisations' started to become patriarchal.