The claim is basically rubbish. Latter-day Margret Meads invent stories about these things either for political gain (promoting feminism) or financial gain (like selling books to naive feminists).

Before modern civilization, life was brutal and short just about everywhere. A tribe (even a very large tribe) which was dominated by women who were constrained by their need to care for and breast-feed children could simply not compete with an aggressive neighboring tribe led by relatively unconstrained men. Any such civilizations (if they ever existed) would have been incredibly fragile, and collapsed as soon as they came into contact with male dominated tribes.

This is an example of feminists trying to rewrite history.