A quibble -- "matrilineal" doesn't mean "matriarchal." The former means just that lineage is traced through maternal rather than paternal descent, and it's a well-attested phenomenon in various cultures. The latter means that women have a monopoly, or at least predominance, of social leadership and authority. The supposed existence of such societies in distant places and times is pretty much a myth concocted for ideological purposes.
According to the Ars Technica article, in the matrilineal society, "[m]en are not allowed to own land at all, any money or goods earned by a male are handed over to his wife or sister, and inheritances go to the youngest daughter in the family." If that is accurate, then it seems reasonable to call the society matriarchal, at least in certain respects.
Purportedly matriarchal societies resemble underclass society. Women do the work and raise the children, and males rough up the girls from time to time, have sex with them, and take their stuff. Thus in primitive "matriarchal" societies, women own the land, and men don't exactly own the women, but rather predate on women and children erratically.
It is the society depicted in rap songs.
Back in the days when anthropologists were allowed to classify cultures as less civilized and more civilized, "matriarchal" was not the word they used. Today, "matriarchal" is best understood as a euphemism for scientific terminology that has become utterly unspeakable.
"In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society."
It is presently a commonplace of Western culture that women are worse at spatial reasoning than men, and this is commonly attributed to intrinsic biological differences.
It turns out this may be highly questionable. A study in PNAS studied two nearby tribes in northeast India, one with a strongly patriarchal organisation, one with a strongly matriarchal organisation. Both share the same agrarian diet and lifestyle and DNA tests indicate they are closely related.
In the patriarchal society, women did noticeably worse on spatial reasoning. In the matriarchal society, women and men did about the same.
The authors carefully do not overstate their results, claiming only that they demonstrated that culture influences spatial performance "in the task that we study." However, this promisingly suggests quite a bit of room for improvement of measurable aspects of intelligence may be feasible with proper attention to culture and nurture.
What measurable aspects of intelligence do you attribute to genetic causes? Can you test it this well? How would you fix it and help people be all they can be?
News coverage: ArsTechnica.