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Comment by Shubley | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but this is pure myth. There has never been a human society where primary political/executive power was vested in women, except some developed and recent examples.

The idea of tribes controlled by women just never happened; not once. It's wishful revisionism motivated by modern politics.

Pinker discusses this a bit in this speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw

And of course other have noted the male dominance in pretty much all the similar primate species. Human are brute animals, nothing more.

And no, just because (pre)historically it was this way doesn't mean I'm saying it ought to be this way everywhere and forever. Natural != ideal.

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What about the picts?

Women in Pictish society were regarded as the equal of men and succession in leadership (later kingship) was matrilineal (through the mother's side), with the reigning chief succeeded by either his brother or perhaps a nephew but not through patrilineal succession of father to son. [0]

[0]http://www.ancient.eu/picts/

You have a small farm community of four houses, a few hundred/thousands years ago. One of the families has a animal die and is in dire need for help. Who do they ask for help?

Some warrior, sitting on a iron throne and passing down judgment from high in one the houses, or is it the old women of the village who carries the memories of who did whom a favor and is responsible for the community threads that binds the families together. Who has the power to make the decision?

>Some warrior, sitting on a iron throne and passing down judgment from high in one the houses, or is it the old women of the village who carries the memories of who did whom a favor and is responsible for the community threads that binds the families together. Who has the power to make the decision?

if recent thousand of years of history is any guidance - the warrior on the throne will be asked to punish the witch[es] (some of those old women) for the curse that caused the animal to die, and the property of those witches would be shared between the warrior and the family of the reporter.

While the waves of witch trial came and decline, that is mostly a 15th and early 16th centuries concept done by the church and not by small farm communities. There is no "thousand of years of history" where farm communities regularly killed the elder women, and its common theme in non-European/Christian history.

Its kind of telling if current view of history is that all elder women was hunted down and killed as witches under a single religion.

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