Which group in the homo evolution development that men take on a more dominating role than female?

Question

Which group in the homo evolution development that men take on a more dominating role than female?

Answer 1

Male and female relations are always relative to different groups with differing economic strategies, even among non-human primates and early homo.

We know from living with some hunters and gatherers before increased contact with Europeans that males and females in several groups had much more egalitarian relationships than we can imagine now.

Male travelers, missionaries, and anthropologists were the first to write about male and female relationships in other groups early on. Their interpretations were largely based on view points about male and female relationships that came from their own Victorian era lives. They rarely tried to understand the power of women in a group.

The assumptions in your question come from the "Man the Hunter" model, which was popular in the 1960s before women had much influence in anthropology.

Our sexual dimorphism continues to decrease and is relatively small compared to many non-human primate groups. Size and strength are only one type of power.

It is clear that in most groups, domination and power were relative to who brought in food and other goods and had power to distribute those goods. In many many groups women contributed more than 70 to 80 percent of the total caloric food intake. In the northern climates, where meat was the primary food available, men as hunters did often dominate. In places where women brought in a lot of food stuffs, or in horticultural cultures (as opposed to agricultural) women had a great deal of power, often more than men in many cultural contexts.

Men in any culture dominate in some areas and women in others. The problem comes in not studying or taking into consideration the whole cultural picture.

And so in homo evolution, we can only assume 'domination'. The question also becomes domination in what contexts and for what reasons. Even among non-human primates, females dominate more often when female relatives, children, mothers, aunts, grandmothers etc. stay together. They support each other and prevent male abuse etc. When females have to move from their natal groups to mate, they have little support and males dominate.

The same is true for humans. In societies where several generations of related women lived together in the same household, they dominated. When women have to move from their families of origin to the husband's household or group, women have much less power than men throughout their lives, especially if the husband lives in the same household or in close proximity to his male relatives.

Answer 2

In later hominins, an emphasis on the needs of hunting was present, consequently, males would be dominant as they are the chief providers of meat. Consequently, it is very likely that in H. ergaster/erectus, H. heidelbergensis, and H. neanderthalensis, males were dominant over females.

Among Australopithecines, we can only guess the population dynamics by examining the degree of sexual dimorphism. A. afarensis showed high sexual dimorphism indicating in had a unimale polygynous society like gorillas do, in which males are dominant. Robust australopithecines also display a significant degree of sexual dimorphism, suggesting that males might have been dominant in those societies as well.

Since most hominins were pioneer species and occupied niches where food was neither hopelessly scarce or present in defendable patches (which leads to female philopatry), it is likely that most species were male dominant. Like chimpanzees and unlike bonobos, early hominins likely needed to survive off of many different kinds of food. This is also evidenced in their teeth wear.

Answer 3

We can only speculate based on the limited evidence either way. We will never definitively know the answers to these sorts of questions.