The article even talks about how they use terms like female-centered instead of matriarchal because the so-called scholars don’t wanna think about it

Benjamin Arbuckle, an archaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who was not involved in the study, wrote in a perspective in Science that “if the sex patterns were reversed, there would likely be little hesitation in concluding that patriarchal power structures were at play.”

“This is reflective of the difficulty that many scholars have in imagining a world characterized by substantial female power despite abundant archaeological, historic, and ethnographic evidence that matriarchal fields of power were and are widespread,” Arbuckle said.