Well, I think this is a bit of an exaggeration. Patriarchy is a pretty dominant social structure across many different cultures, not just European. There are exceptions, yes, but it seems far more common than it should be if that was purely coincidental. Based on my reading, patriarchy is strongly associated with the rise of agriculture and with patrilocal marriage and may not have existed prior to those institutions, but early human history has a very scant level of evidence remaining, unfortunately.

However, the relatively low sexual dimorphism in humans does suggest that early human societies were fairly egalitarian with respect to the sexes.