‘History is a story Western culture buffs tell each other,’ writes the feminist scholar Donna Haraway.

On the contrary, she found that kin relationships in other primates are consistently organised through mothers rather than fathers. This may not be hugely significant – it could well be that humans are just different – but it was so persistent a feature that it led Thompson to wonder whether scientists who had studied humans might have

By thinking about gendered inequality as rooted in something unalterable within us, we fail to see it for what it is: something more fragile that has had to be constantly remade and reasserted.

In academic circles the problem has its own name: the ‘matrilineal puzzle’.

According to Creanza, the single factor that did seem to affect a society’s move away from matriliny was ‘when populations had property, not in terms of land, but movable, transmissible wealth, where if your offspring inherited this thing that you have, they would be potentially better off’. But even this correlation didn’t hold true all of the

What sets them apart is that bonobo females form tight social bonds with each other, even when they’re not related, cementing those relationships and easing tensions by rubbing their genitals together. These intimate social networks create power, locking out the possibility for individual males to dominate the group.

The most dangerous part of any form of oppression is that it can make people believe that there are no alternatives. We see this in the old fallacies of race, caste, and class. The question for any theory of male domination is why this one form of inequality should be treated as an exception.

The debris of the past suggests that the reality of male-dominated ideologies and institutions as they emerged couldn’t have been one flat system in which all men exercised power over all women at once, but variations depending on local circumstances.

Primates, it seems, don’t like to be ruled by bullies or treated unfairly: some of the key traits linked to dominance are kindness, sociability, and cooperation. Even the physically smallest chimpanzee can end up being the alpha if he shows an ability to win trust and loyalty, adds de Waal.