It all depends on how you define trhiving.. if by thriving you mean technological development .. you are right.. but there were only a few of them who get clearly ahead on that area.

If you think thriving is solving the social instabilities... and social problems.. or that thriving is having a complex socio-symbolic structures (rich and amazing).. then patriarhal and amtriarchal cna give you examples of both (and the eskimos with their family being our"type" of family as well).

Would you like some reading about it?

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude