Science

It seems likely that every human culture has had some concept of gender and norms related to it. Those roles can be permissive or strictly enforced. They can match the expectations our culture gives us, or they can be surprising to us. Beside average size, and childbearing, there is unlimited flexibility in how a culture might define the roles and how they might enforce them.

While it is a tempting thought, it seems unlikely that we, here and now, have somehow managed to create the absolute worst human culture in the millions of years we have been at this. I agree that we should be watchful of that pitfall. Western self loathing, is in itself another way of assuming that we must be the main characters in the human story.

It is hard to know. 'Buffalo bird women' was the name of a specific person who grew up just before Europeans arrived (but smallpox arrived before she was born, and probabchanged culture). If you google you can find interviews with her as an old Lady. She gives a picture of how things changed over her life ,but not so much before.

Unfortunately north America in general doesn't have easy access to materials that survive for centuries and so there is limited archeological evidence to work off. (Not zero, but we know little about culture because they couldn't leave much evidence of it behind).