Jordan Peterson on anthropology: what the evidence says · JRE #877
SUBJECT: ANTHROPOLOGY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
No, it didn't exist, there's no evidence for it whatsoever, it's complicated but it's the telling of a kind of psychological myth as if it was history
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Peterson claimed there is "no evidence whatsoever" for the prehistoric matriarchal society described by archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, calling it pure myth presented as history. Gimbutas, a Lithuanian-American archaeologist, put forward in the 1960s the theory that woman-centered societies dominated in Europe until roughly 5,000 years ago, when they were toppled by patriarchal nomadic invaders from the steppe; this was a real, published scholarly hypothesis rather than an invention with zero underlying academic work. A 2025 review of ancient-DNA and isotope research on prehistoric gender relations found no evidence for the clean matriarchy-to-patriarchy "watershed" central to Gimbutas's model, but did document genuine matrilineal and matrilocal societies at various times and places, such as an elite matrilineal community at Chaco Canyon around the 10th century and a matrilineal farming community in eastern China thousands of years earlier. On balance, Peterson's claim that the thesis has no evidentiary basis overstates the case: Gimbutas's hypothesis was a real, if now largely unsupported, academic proposal rather than pure fabrication, even though current research does not confirm the specific matriarchal "Old Europe" she described.