I really would like to provide a link for this, but I read it in a book a while back and can’t find a website saying it, so there you go. There was one of those Paleolithic era cave art sites found a while back, an unusual one with portraits of many individuals. (Usually if there are human figures, they’re stylized to the point of abstraction, but in this one particular cave, it looked like they just painted the whole local group.) Anyway, those figures which could be clearly classified as men and women overwhelmingly showed the women with long hair and the men with short. It seems to have been the norm for tens of thousands of years, at least in some places.
The thing about this question, though, is that it begs the question of female hair length. I’m not sure it’s almost universal for all women. Maybe the “ideal,” or maybe something “prevalent in younger women,” or maybe “in most cultures,” but as soon as you look closely at it, the granularity of cultures and styles and times are so different.
Also, while Biblical references to long hair may clearly represent the Hebrew/Christian preference for long hair in women (and that in itself informing later European, Puritan, and Western preference for it), Biblical culture is by no means what I’d call “universal.” Their neighbors, the Egyptians, didn’t have gender-based standards for hair length (link), various religious orders shave their heads, etc.