An enduring idea within some modern Pagan communities is of a matriarchal golden age, a time when women, and their goddesses (or a singular “Great Goddess”), oversaw a time of peace and prosperity. This period in history is generally thought to have ended by the violent incursions of the Indo-European peoples (though some scholars argue the transition was more gradual and peaceful than previously thought). In our modern era, many have tried to prove or debunk the idea that a matriarchy would mean a more peaceful and cooperative society, with partisans on both sides of this issue firmly entrenched in their opinions.

A community of bonobo monkeys.

Now a new scientific study of our closest genetic relatives might just shed some more light on whether a female-dominated society would truly a more cooperative and peaceful one. This study (by Martin Surbeck and Gottfried Hohmann), focusing on the female-dominated bonobo society of monkeys, posits that they are just as violent as their patriarchal chimpanzees cousins, and actively hunt and kill other apes in the wild. At the I09 blog, Annalee Newitz briefly quotes evolutionary anthropologist Gottfried Hohmann concerning the findings.

“In chimpanzees, male-dominance is associated with physical violence, hunting, and meat consumption. By inference, the lack of male dominance and physical violence is often used to explain the relative absence of hunting and meat eating in bonobos. Our observations suggest that, in contrast to previous assumptions, these behaviors may persist in societies with different social relations.”

In other words, a variety of social hierarchies can conceivably result in a variety of behaviors, and no singular construction of society is necessarily immune from violent or aggressive behavior by its leaders. If studying primate behavior tells us anything at all about human behavior, it tells us that we shouldn’t take for granted that any particular societal construction was necessarily “better” or “more peaceful”. For every cooperative matriarchal society at peace with its surroundings, there could have been another that raided its neighbors, and engaged in behaviors usually associated with the more “violent” Indo-European invaders. Perhaps, in the end, humanity as a whole, no matter who is “on top” (societally speaking) will always struggle with the same failings and problems.

Tags: academia, bonobo monkeys, goddess, matriarchy, primates, The Goddess