With a steady stream of new research coming to light, it is becoming clear that the version of Western history we are taught in school - has a thick layer of patriarchal myth-making.

Heide Goettner-Abendroth has spent her whole life studying what this patriarchal overlay is hiding, and in her new book Matriarchal Societies of the Past and the Rise of Patriarchy in Europe and West Asia, using a new matriarchal paradigm, she reveals evidence of an ancient past that looks very different from the official history of “civilization” that our Western history promotes.

In this episode, Heide talks through the evidence that points to millennia of peaceful development taking place in mother-centered cultures, throughout the Neolithic and before that the Paleolithic. Human societies with well-developed social structures, whose creativity and inventions laid the foundation for life as we know it.