Hmmmm... a dear friend, a member of the Iroquois nation, has told me on many occasions that, by tradition, the Clan-mothers have always had very important roles in governance. She tells me that the so-called Founding Fathers of the USA studied and admired the Iroquois government, and even incorporated some of its elements into the Articles of Confederation and its successor, the Constitution. In fact, she told me that there was a point in time when the Iroquois Confederacy considered inviting the settlers to become part of the Confederacy. The so-called Founding Fathers declined because they did not want to become part of a "petticoat government."

This seems entirely plausible to me, as I've read up on Anthropology and how various peoples manage their societies. Prior to the Agricultural Revolution, there were thousands of independent societies, beginning in Africa then migrating all over the world over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. Each people, faced with varying environments and genetics, would have worked out over long time periods what works best for them. Even today, many surviving traditional societies are egalitarian or matriarchal. This was even more true before expanding agricultural societies displaced bands of herders and hunter / gatherers.

So it is impossible to make one general statement -- such as that all ancestral hunter / gatherer societies were patriarchal -- that would apply to all. The band on one side of the ridge could have a society more different from the band on the other side of the ridge than those of, say, Frenchmen and Xhosa, today.