It's an active area of debate with archeology and anthropology. It's generally been assumed that hunter-gatherer societies were very egalitarian, but there's a

It's an active area of debate with archeology and anthropology. It's generally been assumed that hunter-gatherer societies were very egalitarian, but there's a lot of evidence that this is an over generalization. We now have pretty good evidence of small-scale societies being very hierarchical and evidence of larger scale societies being extremely egalitarian. In addition, the general categorization of the political organization of these societies seems to be the most problematic thing. In just 200 years, western society has profoundly changed the way we self-organize so there's no reason to think these societies somehow remained the same for millions of years. Instead we see evidence of deep experimentation in most societies. Some even varied drastically from season to season. For example, the Cheyenne (Suhtai and Tsitsistas) and the Lakota of the Great Plains in the 19th century would appoint a leader with basically absolute authority during the late summer for buffalo hunts. The rest of the year they were extremely egalitarian with no one holding any formal power. Similarly, many societies experimented heavily with forms of agriculture and hybrid forms of subsistence and would adapt their form of social organization to adapt to those forms of subsistence. So yeah, it's problematic to make such a generalization. However, it should also be noted that many scholars have recently pointed out that the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest might've had a larger impact on the core debates of the European Enlightenment than past European thinkers did. People from the Pacific Northwest likely had a lot of experience living in large hierarchical urban societies like Cahokia (which at one point was larger than any European city) and their egalitarian politics can be examined as a direct response to this experience. Anthropologists have also documented what they unfortunately named "Missipization" that spread throughout much of Eastern North America after the decline of Cahokia, possibly bringing with it a wave of democratic forms of political organization.