There are things that, precisely because they have existed for a long time, end up seeming natural to us, patriarchy is one of them.
Patriarchy is documented in many historical societies. We find it in laws, family structures, the transmission of property, religions, and the organization of power. For centuries, it has been justified through God, nature, or biology. Today, even when it is no longer considered right or desirable, it is often perceived as something ancient, almost inscribed in the history of our species; and there are even those who dust it off, adding a geographical adjective to the word patriarchy, to give it an even more remote and foundational origin.
Ma Ancient doesn't mean natural. Widespread doesn't mean universal. And a biological difference doesn't automatically produce a social hierarchy.
The question, then, isn't just why male domination exists. It's also this: Why are we so quick to consider it the starting point of human history?
When the archaeological record doesn't allow us to know precisely how a society was organized, we're tempted to imagine it based on what we know. And since for much of recorded history, societies have been patriarchal, patriarchy risks becoming the default hypothesis even for the most distant past.
If we have no evidence of another form of organization, we imagine the one most familiar to us, but the absence of evidence of an alternative is not evidence of patriarchy.
Three authors, Brown TadoliniClaudine Cohen and Claire Alet approach this problem from different perspectives. They don't propose a common theory, but their questions allow us to distinguish three levels that are too often overlapped: biological difference, the formation of relationships of domination and the construction of a patriarchal system.
Does biology explain women's subordination?
Bruna Tadolini starts with a question that forces us to change our perspective.
For a long time, human evolution was told primarily through male figures. Man the hunter, man the inventor, man who conquers new territories, fights, protects, and leads the group; women appeared primarily as mothers.
In The feminine evolution, Tadolini instead brings attention to the contribution of females to the evolutionary history of Homo sapiensThe female body, reproduction, pregnancy, and childbearing aren't simply marginal aspects of an evolutionary story that takes place elsewhere. They're part of it. But the most important point, for our question, is another.
Biological difference does not already contain a social hierarchy.
Pregnancy is a biological fact. The way a society organizes pregnancy is not.
Motherhood has concrete material consequences. But this does not mean that women should be excluded from power, property, or collective decisions. Sexual difference can produce differences in bodily experiences. It does not dictate who should be in charge.
This seems obvious, yet it's exactly the transition many evolutionary narratives have made without openly declaring it: from difference to division of labor, from division to hierarchy, and from hierarchy to domination, as if each transition were inevitable. It isn't.
Even the old image of a rigid Paleolithic division between "hunter man" and "gatherer woman" has long been subjected to an increasingly careful revision. In an article published in American Anthropologist, the anthropologists Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock They note that the idea of a rigid sexual division of labor in the Paleolithic has often been taken for granted, despite the limited direct evidence. Examining tools, diet, art, anatomy, paleopathologies, and burials, the two scholars highlight several lines of evidence consistent with women's involvement in hunting and invite us to question the weight of contemporary stereotypes in our reconstructions of the past.
This does not mean to affirm the opposite, that is, that men and women always did the same things; here too, we must avoid the counter-myth.
Ethnographically known hunting societies often exhibit a gender-based division of labor, albeit with notable differences and flexibility. A recent response to the debate over the myth of "man the hunter" emphasizes precisely this: female participation in hunting can be frequent without eliminating all forms of sexual division of labor.
The issue, therefore, is not to deny differences but not to automatically transform them into a scale of value.
How does a domination relationship arise?
The next question is the one posed by Claudine Cohen.
In his recent From the origins of masculine dominationCohen doesn't treat male domination as an immutable essence of humanity. Instead, he seeks to reconstruct its genealogy.
She doesn't ask us to imagine an original moment in which men suddenly began to dominate women. Her reconstruction, instead, seeks processes, transformations, and conditions that, through successive stages, could have led to the formation of increasingly structured relationships of domination.
Kinship, the choice of partners, exogamy, alliances between groups, the control of reproduction, economic and social transformations.
These are all elements that can contribute to profoundly changing relations between the sexes.
Cohen's perspective is important because it shifts the problem from nature to history. But precisely for this reason, it raises a crucial methodological question.
How can we distinguish, in the remote past, the conditions that may have favored domination from domination itself?
A change in postmarital residence, for example, doesn't automatically tell us everything else. A patrilocal community, assuming we can confidently identify it, isn't necessarily patrilineal. And a patrilineal society isn't automatically, for that reason alone, a patriarchal system in the full sense of the term.
It may seem like an overly subtle distinction. In reality, it's anything but marginal.
In 2025, two studies seriously questioned some of the inferential chains that had become very common in the interpretation of European archaeogenetic data. A paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B analyzed the models used to infer ancestry from the genetic data of Neolithic and Bronze Age populations. The conclusion is significant: many data are compatible with the patrilocality, but they do not demonstrate the patrilinearity which has often been deduced from them.
In the same year, a large meta-analysis published in Current Anthropology She criticized the tendency to conflate female mobility, patrilocality, patrilinearity, and, ultimately, patriarchy. The authors do not deny that patrilocality existed in European prehistory. Rather, they challenge its assumption as a universal model and the almost automatic shift from greater mobility among some women to a general reconstruction of male dominance.
This is an important methodological lesson: A piece of data can be correct and its interpretation too broad.
When does domination become a system?
This is where Claire Alet's perspective becomes useful.
In his Matrix. From the origins of masculine dominationAlet approaches the issue from a broader historical and social perspective. The issue is not simply when a power relationship between men and women arises, but how that relationship can transform into a structure capable of reproducing itself.
Now we need to distinguish more precisely a gender inequality from patriarchy.
A society may experience differences in roles, attribute greater prestige to certain activities, have men occupy certain positions of authority, and may even experience relationships of domination.
But patriarchy, if we want to use the term rigorously, implies something more.
It implies that male dominance is embodied and reproduced through institutions: family, lineage, marriage, property, inheritance, access to resources, control of sexuality and reproductive capacity.
We don't necessarily have to look for all these elements in the same way and in every society. But we must avoid calling every observable difference between men and women "patriarchy."
Alet focuses his attention precisely on the structures through which domination can consolidate and intertwine with the accumulation and transmission of wealth.
Your question can be formulated like this: When does the power of some men over women cease to be a contingent relationship and become part of the very organization of society?
This is a question we cannot answer simply by looking at one burial being richer than another.
The Neolithic: One Origin or Many Different Stories?
The Neolithic occupies a central place in almost all discussions of the origins of inequality.
Agriculture – Sedentary lifestyle – Accumulation of resources – Property – Inheritance – Population growth.
New forms of control of reproduction and lineage.
The temptation is to construct a simple sequence: first egalitarian communities of hunters, then agriculture, then property, finally patriarchy.
It's a neat story, perhaps too neat.
The Neolithic was not a single process; it unfolded at very different times, places, and in very different conditions. Agricultural societies were not all organized in the same way, and they did not produce the same kinship relationships everywhere.
New genetic data is making this strain even more noticeable.
In Gurgy, France, a Western Neolithic community dating approximately between 4850 and 4500 BC has yielded a kinship pattern based on two major lineages, with evidence interpreted as patrilocality, patrilinearity, and female exogamy. It is a concrete and extraordinarily well-documented example of a particular Neolithic social organization. But it is just that, a case.
Other contexts tell different stories.
In 2025, a study of two cemeteries at the Neolithic site of Fujia in eastern China, dating between 2750 and 2500 BC, identified a community organized around two maternal clans. The study combined ancient DNA, archaeological context, and isotopic analyses, providing one of the clearest genomic demonstrations of matrilineal descent in prehistory.
Matrilineality is a form of descent organization that demonstrates that Male descent cannot automatically be considered the only possible form of organization of prehistoric communities.
Even Europe, which is often portrayed through a progressive normalization of patrilocality, offers surprises. A study published in Nature In January 2025, he analysed 57 ancient genomes from Iron Age communities in southern Britain and identified a strongly matrilocal structure, with kin groups centred on maternal lines and a predominance of unrelated men who appear to have entered local groups.
Once again, matrilocality makes it impossible to continue to narrate the whole of European prehistory as a single, uniform movement towards patrilocal and patriarchal families.
The problem is not choosing an origin, but asking for evidence
At this point it might seem that the goal is to deny the existence of patriarchy in prehistory.
But evidence of patrilocal, patrilineal forms of gender, and profound inequalities exists in many ancient societies. The earliest historical societies documented by writing often exhibit explicit norms that placed men and women in different legal and social positions.
The problem is therefore another.
How far back can we project these structures?
And above all: with what degree of certainty? We can't demand rigorous archaeological evidence for every hypothesis of non-patriarchal organization and then consider patriarchy the automatic explanation every time the data is ambiguous.
The same caution must apply to all hypotheses.
If a set of data allows us to conclude that some women moved after marriage, we can discuss patrilocality.
If it allows us to reconstruct male genealogical lines, we can discuss patrilineality.
But we must not jump directly from here to patriarchy without asking ourselves what other elements are necessary to speak of a structured system of domination.
Why then does patriarchy seem natural to us?
Maybe because we stopped seeing it as a story.
A social structure that endures for a very long time tends to become invisible. It no longer appears as a particular form of organization, but as the order of things, and once the order of things is mistaken for nature, the past begins to reflect the present.
We imagine that men have always had power because we know they have had it for a long time, then we use this image from the past to demonstrate that their power is natural.
It's a circular argument.
The lesson we can draw from the comparison between Tadolini, Cohen, and Alet is not that there is a simple and definitive answer to the question of the origins of patriarchy. On the contrary.
Tadolini reminds us that biology does not automatically contain subordination.
Cohen invites us to search the historical processes through which a domination can be built, rather than considering it an immutable essence.
Alet takes us to look to the structures that transform a power relationship into a system capable of reproducing itself.
These are three different questions, and perhaps it is precisely by keeping them distinct that we can avoid transforming a historical reconstruction into a new myth of origins.
Not an ideal past, but better questions
We don't need to imagine a perfect prehistory, nor do we need to deny that biological differences had concrete consequences on the life of human communities.
We must, more simply, stop considering the steps that lead us from difference to domination as automatic.
Difference is not subordination and division of tasks is not necessarily hierarchy.
Patrilocality is not automatically patrilinearity. Patrilinearity is not automatically patriarchy.
And a patriarchal society, however ancient and widespread, is not for this reason the original and inevitable condition of humanity.
Perhaps we should start asking patriarchy the same question that has long been asked of its possible alternatives: where, when and with what evidence can we recognize its presence?
Because nature isn't something that has a history, and patriarchy, however long and complex its history, is a history we still have to learn to reconstruct without transforming our beliefs about the present into certainties about the past.
Sources:
- Tadolini, Bruna, Female Evolution: The Contribution of Females to the Evolution of Homo Sapiens, Mimesis, Milan-Udine, 2017.
- Cohen, Claudine, From the origins of masculine domination, Passés Composés, Paris, 2025, 248 pp. The book reconstructs the relationships between men and women from the origins of humanity to the Bronze Age, questioning the processes through which the foundations of patriarchy were formed.
- Alet, Claire, Matrix. From the origins of masculine domination, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 2024. It is an investigation into the roots and historical structures of male domination, explicitly inspired, among others, by the reflections of Françoise Héritier.
