Ancestral Women Were Feminists Who Forced Men to Live with In-Laws, Study

So what do we know about our prehistoric ancestors? Were they really savages with clubs and spears?

Maybe, but they did one thing better than us. They seemed to be surprisingly advanced in gender equality, according to dailymail. Early men spent a lot of time with their in-laws, and women had equal say in all the decisions.

Isn't that an awesome concept?

"There is still this wider perception that hunter-gatherers are more macho or male-dominated," Mark Dyble, an anthropologist who led the study at University College London said. "We'd argue that it was only with the emergence of agriculture, when people could start to accumulate resources, that inequality emerged," he said.

Hence, we can come to the conclusion that "Inequality between the sexes could be a relatively modern invention," according to uncovercalifornia.

Having spent a couple of years with hunter-gatherers in Congo and the Philippines, collecting data and taking interviews, the researchers found that even though they lived in small communities, hunter-gatherers were part of larger groups with a number of persons that were not even related

Although they are shown as being "dim-witted evolutionary losers" the Neanderthals were not driven to extinction due to "lack of brains". They just vanished 40,000 years ago due to interbreeding and integration into modern human ancestors. They are known to have made stone tools and even jewellery. About 130,000 years ago, they made a necklace or bracelot from eight talons taken from a white-tailed eagle. Found at a Neanderthal site at Krapina in Croatia, they were used to create a necklace or bracelet.

In fact, the archaeological evidence of 200,000 years ago shows that the Neanderthals were progressive and advanced, not barbaric as is thought. The human species are not different enough to account for the decline of the Neanderthals.

Although they lived in small communities, hunter-gatherers lived in groups with a large number of individuals that were not related.

When only men were in charge, they stayed only with their close relations. But when the responsibility shifted to women, the men were forced to spend time with in-laws, who were also taken into the group. Hence, the groups were diverse, as less direct family members stayed together.

"When only men have influence over who they are living with, the core of any community is a dense network of closely related men with the spouses on the periphery," said Dyble. "If men and women decide, you don't get groups of four or five brothers living together."

It was just agriculture that made men collect resources and create inequality. "While previous researchers have noted the low relatedness of hunter-gatherer bands, our work offers an explanation as to why this pattern emerges," said Dyble. "It is not that individuals are not interested in living with kin. Rather, if all individuals seek to live with as many kin as possible, no one ends up living with any kin at all."

That kind of gender equality would have given them an edge for survival, playing a major role in evolution. "Sex equality suggests a scenario where unique human traits such as cooperation with unrelated individuals could have emerged in our evolutionary past," said senior author, Dr Andrea Migliano.