European Economic History Tenth Century to the Present Theory and History of Economic Change Book

I took exception to Robert McElvaine's reiterated claim that there's never been a matriarchal society, especially on the heels of this passage which in my mind is akin to the limitlessness of space.

A major problem with historical interpretation is that historians have usually spoken of the time a few centuries before 3000 B.C.E. when writing was invented as the "dawn of history," and then proceeded to act as if it were also the dawn of human existence. Most textbooks in world or Western civilization, for example, devote a page or so to the hundreds of thousands of years of the Paleolithic Age and perhaps three or four pages to the Neolithic, which itself was as long as all of subsequent history.

I'm sure as a Ph.D. Mr McElaine is a million times more knowledgeable than myself, but I would challenge him to read the Alphabet Vs. the Goddess by Leonard Shlain who has a completely different opinion about the origins of the suppression of women and the rise of the patriarchy.