Not really much to elaboration needed on the thread title. The earliest documentation[sup]*[/sup] I can think of is that Jesus’s mom’s virgin pregnancy was considered odd. So, sex= pregnancy has been a known concept for at least 2000 years (give or take)
Here’s my thinking. If we go back far enough, the human race is just monkeys doin the nasty[sup]**[/sup]. Babies are born and raised on instinct with no rational thought as to why or how they are made.
Further down the line, these monkeys are more or less human have a conscious mind and language and still don’t know that it takes a sperm and an egg to get pregnant.
Then, someone puts 2 and 2 together and realizes that pregnancy only happens after sex. Who and/or when was this?
Unfortunately, googling ‘sex’ doesn’t do much to answer this question.
If this proves to be an unknown, I have no problem getting this shuttled over to IMHO, if people want to give their best guesses on it.
[sup]*[/sup]not interested in discussing the accuracy of the bible or this lady’s virgin pregnancy. I only bring it up because someone wrote down, in a book, that this lady had a virgin pregnancy. Since the author thought that it was odd, I’m assuming that sex = pregnancy was know at the time.
[sup]**[/sup] yes gross oversimplification. My point is that animals don’t know this cause/effect result. So, I’m assuming, if we look far enough back, this is something humans were unaware of.
My guess would be that it’s just too far back to research or have any documentation on.
I’d be more interested in finding out when they realized what was happening at a microscopic level. The exsistence of an actual sperm + egg. Before that I wonder what type of theories floated about? All they knew was a man ejaculating semen into a woman created a baby. As far as what was in the semen and what the woman contributed besides a womb who knows?
Think there’s some biblical language about that microscopic stuff too, at least in a limited sense. They refered to sperm as “seed”, and I seem to remember something about some guy spilling his seed on the ground so as to not knock up whoever he was boinking.
Oh, crazy shit, Hampshire. Theories included a little homonuculus in the sperm, which provided all of the material (and the woman just provided the incubator), for one that I can remember.
The seed-spilling guy is Onan, which is why the old-timey term for jacking it is onanism.
While “seed” is a euphemism used all over the place for semen, with the obvious metaphor of planting a plant seed in the ground, nobody saw actual sperm cells until microscopes were invented. Ova were more easily spotted because many species’ eggs are visible to the naked eye, including humans eggs.
Yeah, but that’s not even the earliest pregnancy = sex story in the Bible.
For example, David committed adultery with Bathsheba, got her pregnant, and tried to cover it up by having Uriah come home to have sex with her. When he wouldn’t do it because it was unfair to the other soldiers, David had him put on the front lines(essentially murdering him).
There’s a whole section on theories of babymaking in Cats Are Not Peas. Like Zsofia said, there was some pretty wacky stuff. The presence of sperm in semen wasn’t discovered until the invention of the microscope. I don’t remember when the ova was found. When they were both identifided, scientists were devided into the egg camp and the sperm camp, believing that only one was responsible for the formation of the baby. It was even suggested that sperm were parasites that happened to colonize semen. Weird stuff.
There have been cultures in recent history that didn’t make the connection between sex and pregnancy. Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski reported in the early 20th century that Trobriand islanders believed that pregnancy was caused by spirits entering the womb as women bathed in the lagoon.
I think it would be pretty hard for any self-aware human to miss the connection between sex and offspring and that we probably got the idea before we were self-aware. My guess is that asking this is like asking an individual “When did you realize you had toes?” They won’t know - they knew about toes before they had the cognitive ability to remember a time of not knowing.
Even prior to domesticated animals, humans had to have observed wild animals, most of which go through a mating season that’s pretty hard to miss. Any successful hunter (even a wolf or shark) “knows” that the season for sex precedes the season for getting pregnant or laying eggs.
I also tend to think we’d have observed it in our own species. Even if you believe in cave men carrying women off by their hair and treating them as mere property, you’d have to believe that some women were allowed to refrain from sex (for example, after the death of a partner or as some kind of priestess) or be unable to have sex (for example, due to extreme vaginismus or a birth-related injury). Even if we’re talking 1% of women, that’s enough to put together a theory that you could then test by practicing a little self control.
The thing is, sex != offspring in a tidy, one-to-one sense, even now. Just ask anyone trying to get pregnant. The woman, man, or both might be infertile or have low fertility, or the woman might miscarry for any number of reasons, many of which – illness, injury, eating toxic plants – would have been far more common in prehistory. Even with a normal, healthy pair of adults the timing has to be right. And even if certain women were “allowed” to refrain from sex, or even forbidden from it for whatever reason, they might well go ahead and have sex anyway. And of course, little kids engage in sex play just because it feels good, and so it seems at least possible that you might have some pre-pubescent sex happening.
So what you end up with is a much muddier picture: most (probably) people have sex, and some who do have babies, and some do not; and among those who “don’t” (;)) have sex some have babies, and some do not. I can easily see this being something that self-aware people could “miss”.
Another issue is heritence. It doesn’t take long for folks to realize that a baby bears a certain resemblance to the woman that baby came out of, and also bears a similar resemblance to the man who’s routinely having sex with that woman. Any model of pregnancy must take this observation into account somehow
True. But, as someone mentioned upthread, this can also be less obvious if 1) you’re dealing with a small, homogeneous-looking population, especially if there’s a lot of interbreeding, and 2) if there’s not just one man routinely having sex with a given woman.
Onan. He had been obliged to marry his dead brother’s widow. Any children of that levirate marriage would have been considered his brother’s heirs rather than his own. Why this vexed him is not made clear