A recently conducted study revealed that men and women might have shared equal status in several prehistoric societies. The study researchers stated that male dominance rose with the adoption of agriculture and excess of resources that came with the changing lifestyle.

Gender equality might appear to be a new topic, but researchers believe that equality between sexes might have provided a survival advantage to group of early humans. It may have helped early humans to develop new social and language skills, theorized researchers.

Investigators believe that females had influence equal to men in decisions regarding where their groups lived, and with whom.

They hypothesized that farming might have been the major cause that saw dominance of men over women in most of the early societies.

Mark Dyble, lead author of the University College London, said, “There is still this wider perception that hunter-gatherers are more macho or male-dominated. We'd argue it was only with the emergence of agriculture, when people could start to accumulate resources, which inequality emerged”.

Anthropologists got the results while attempting to answer one of the outstanding questions in that field of science. People living in hunter-gatherer societies tend to express a desire to live with family members while, in reality, they tend to camp with few relatives.

Researchers found this choice as quite surprising as hunter-gatherers rely majorly on family to help raise children and are rarely far from their relatives.

Researchers for the study studied hunter-gatherers societies living in the Philippines and the Congo. These people tend to live in camps of around 20 people, staying in one area for an average of 10 days before moving to the next area, researchers found.

Computer models showed that the influence of each gender in forming these camps results in distinctive demographics in the residents.