I have to seriously question whether that is the case. Just a few months ago, a thread here on the SD was comparing the time various people had gone without sex. Many of the married respondents had gone months and even years without having sex for various reasons, including relationship problems and medical problems. Everyone I know has had some period in their life (often between relationships) when they simply did not seek out sex. And you can’t tell me that women who had a husband die were immediately having sex with some other guy the very next week - maybe somewhere that was the custom, but certainly not everywhere.
I think this question sort of assumes that there was an “ahah” moment for this, but I doubt there was. I suspect that because of our instincts, at least some sort of idea that there may be a connection between them was already just known long before we could really piece together the actual anatomy behind babymaking.
Also, I don’t think that the idea of sex, then nine months later a baby is really the line either. Certainly it would be pretty obvious that a baby isn’t just preceded by swelling, but also a pause in menstruation. So while it might not be easy to connect sex directly to a baby nine months later, it should be fairly easy to connect a baby to that and then sex to a missed period only a couple weeks away. Certainly there’s not a whole lot of things going on down there to choose from.
And I think it sort of makes sense in that, as I understand, at least some cultures thought of women as sort of like an empty flower pot and it was the man putting his seed in there. That sort of thought seems to follow naturally from agricultural thought of figuring out planting seeds results in them growing into plants. So you see a guy plant his seed, and then it grows in the woman and eventually gets born. So, at worst, I’d put the upper limit on how recently it was figured out that there was a connection at some time soon after we developed agriculture.
Well, everyone step back. We have an eye-witness right here.
MD, step up to the microphone and explain to us all the social constructs you observed during your prehistoric days.
Point me to a primitive society (hunter-gatherer or ancient) that practiced anything like nun or monk celibacy. This seems to have been a construct of later agrarian/urban societies in reaction to knowledge of what sex represents.
This is an interesting question. I was wondering when people figured out semen is the key to making babies - knowing which is necessary to invent contraception.
It doesn’t seem like it would take a massive genius to figure out that no woman ever has a kid until after she starts to have sex, and, further, that the said kid often looks like the guy she’s been having sex with.
The argument is that
-girls will start having sex long before they start having babies.
-not every instance results in pregnancy
-if monogamy is not strict, the association may not be made
OTOH, I’m also inclined to believe that the association was made very early, probably before agriculture, sometime in the stone age; even if it was not determined as a strict cause-and-effect situation…
When humans first tried to sort out how the world around them worked, I’m sure men discovered that male orgasm was pretty powerful magic in terms of general life experience. Also, that’s about the only thing that goes into the vagina, and that’s where babies come out. So whether it’s the “spirits mixing when the earth moves”, or some such explanation, or a simple mechanical connection between semen and babies, I’m sure the association between sex and babies was not difficult.
Since there is evidence from around Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon times of burials with artifacts and other evidence of religious(?) beliefs, I would suspect that is about when humans started trying to decipher their world. Events like births and male orgasms would likely be important events in their life experience and a focus of human curiosity.
All this, of course, wild-ass guesses.
Which comes back to the OP question - outside of silly stuff like squatting over fires, or the Greek legend of virgins facing the wind, etc. - is there any documented evidence that humans did NOT know there was a connection? Any evidence that these are simply the equivalent of “moon is green cheese” or “cabbage patch” stories, told to the young and gullible or repeated as silliness between those who knew better?
Huh?
Also, just like to point out that disparaging The Master can have cataclysmic repercussions…
A lot of the customs we do have - i.e. widows mourn for a year in some cultures - seem to be based on the specific knowledge of sex=reproduction. IIRC, the law from early British times even states that a child borm within 10 months of a husband’s death is considered to be his child, the same concept as the law that a child born of a marriage is assumed to be the husband’s.
In hunter-gatherer societies, I doubt there was a long-term significant position for unattached women. (Recall “A Man Called Horse” where the old widow’s possessions are ceremonially(?) stolen and she is left to die in the cold when her husband dies… )
A man would instead take several “wives”.
I recall hearing an episode of the diaries of one of the early explorers of the North-West Territories. Up near Great Bear Lake, they came across a woman who had escaped from a captor tribe and managed to survive the winter on her own. The explorer’s Indian guides started arguing over who was going to take her, and the winner was the chief of his guides. One of the chief’s 10 wives made a comment that he was not capable of taking care of the wives he already had. That wife died of her injuries a few days later…
We’ve been raised in an egalitarian society to the point where we’ve forgotten what long-ago preconceptions about position and authority meant.
I also wonder how much the modern experience regarding sex translates to earlier times, when it was pretty much a man’s world, and “no” did not mean what it does today. The concept that a man could be convicted of raping his wife is relatively new. The concept that a man could be committing a crime by beating his wife is relatively new. Unless the wife had significant social status on her own, she was at the mercy of her husband.
You’re confusing so many different times and eras and levels of civilization that a full course in Anthropology couldn’t straighten this out.
The farther back in time the more likely woman were to have equal if not superior rights and status. That’s the conclusion from studying all the various surviving forms of tribal structures that westerners came upon when they started exploring the world. It was civilization - the formation of defined hierarchical states - that put men at the top and deprived women of their freedoms. But this is new historically. Even if you push it back to the beginnings of agriculture, which is known to be correlated with the beginnings of permanent villages, that doesn’t go back more than 12-15,000 years in the Levant, and much less in most places. We’re talking about times that are probably at least 40,000 years ago. Why do you keep confusing the two? Egalitarian societies far antedated ours. We didn’t invent anything new.
Don’t forget that a certain percentage of each female population experiences same-sex attraction. In any society in which women enjoyed personal autonomy, and hence would not be forced to mate with a man if she didn’t want to, she might instead want a woman. Gay people, or otherwise same-sex-attracted people, are found in every human population. If patriarchy was invented as a result of agriculture—and if patriarchy is the reason for control over everybody’s sex life (you have to get heterosexually married and make babies and keep your women under tight control to guarantee paternity of a given dad or else Dad/God/the state’ll get mad at you and there will be consequences)—then it follows that in a pre-agricultural, pre-patriarchal phase of social organization women will enjoy more personal autonomy in their sex lives.
Paleolithic calendar bones dating back 20,000–25,000 years appear to track the lunar cycle. There could be various reasons for a Paleolithic person to keep tabs on that, and one of the major such reasons is women keeping track of their menstrual cycles.
We see hunter-gatherer people of today obtaining poor nutrition, but then the extant ones we have firsthand documentation of have been forced off of the best land by the dominant agricultural and industrial people, onto poor land that is barely adequate for subsistence. In Paleolithic times, all the people living on the most fertile, productive land—think of the South of France and the Po Valley—were hunter-gatherers, and with the small populations they had then, it would have been easy for them to obtain adequate nutrition to support a regular menstrual cycle.
So there’s a published theory I find interesting, that Paleolithic women tracking their periods originated mathematics. Why would a woman want to track her periods? Correlating her cycle with her fertility may be one reason.
Maybe, maybe not. From what I’ve read, hunter-gatherer societies like Hearn’s guides suggests that women were NOT equals. The same may be true of many other native American and similar societies, which would be as close as we can get to primitive society.
OTOH, the correlation between female equality/respect may not be argriculture or urbanization so much as thepropensity for war. When the resources are sufficient to allow war, but scarce enough to encourage it, then violence is the rule. Women, who do not typically match men in strength, get the short end of the stick. In societies where every waking minute is spent chasing very scarce resources, I suppose warfare is a luxury and neighbours to war against are few and far between. In environments as diverse as the Inuit of the Arctic or the bushmen of the Kalihari, there is less warefare, less violence, and women are accorded a better place in society. Similarly, in places like polynesian islands, where there was only the one or two villages warfare was limited; OTOH, when the same society got to a large location like New Zealand, warefare exploded.
But the idea that things were ideal and sexes were equal when we all wore deerskins and hunted with flint arrowheads is one of those conceits that seeks to blame men and civilization for what is (sadly) general human nature.
No it doesn’t. Misandric prejudice has never been advocated by the mainstream of feminists. Not even all radical feminists. All the feminists I know respect men and are working for an end to all forms of injustice and prejudice, across the board. To equate criticism of patriarchy with misandry is as dumb as claiming that to criticize the behavior of the state of Israel is the same thing as antisemitism. In the current vernacular: Brother, please. :rolleyes:
Equals in what exactly? That’s somewhat vague. There are so many aspects to compare which could be used as criteria of equality or inequality. I’d like to pin down your precise meaning.
The question is whether pre-patriarchal women had personal agency and autonomy over their sex lives. The forms of control of women’s sex lives known in our world all derive from ancient patriarchy. Looking only through that more recent historical lens will color the view of the ancient past.
Native American* pre-contact tribes lived by hunting/gathering, or by certain kinds of indigenous agriculture in various regions, or probably most often a combination of both in some proportion or other. The most fertile and nutrition-producing areas were inhabited by NA tribes. Did a Native American woman exercise personal agency and autonomy in her sex life? If so, in what degree, and what kind of rights did she have and exercise? The answers varied depending on her tribe. My point is there was diversity of sexual culture because there was a diversity of tribal cultures and traditions. The only meaningful way to answer the question is in terms of a specific tribe. An overarching statement that all Native Americans lived a certain way falls far short of the full truth. In the tribal memories of the Lenape people, women did exercise their own agency in their sex lives, and their tribe’s tradition was that the men respected that. Abundant first-person testimony by the earliest Europeans to deal with the Lenape corroborate this tradition. Women had a say in which men (or women as the case may be) could approach them sexually; they had a say in whether they had sex and they had a say in how they had sex. Which is what the OP specifically was about…
Ancient Arab tribes were recorded as matriarchies from their earliest appearance in recorded history, ca. 500 BC in Babylonian texts. Patriarchy generally took over in Arabia within historical time. In the fifth century AD, a woman of the most influential family of Mecca named Salma bint ‘Amr was the last
Meccan matriarch, so called. (Personally, matriarchy is not a term I find functionally significant or useful.) Salma’s son was Shaybah ibn Hashim, known as ‘Abd al-Muttalib (fl. 6th century), who was the paternal grandfather of Prophet Muhammad. It was ‘Abd al-Muttalib who altered the power balance and became the first patriarchal ruler of Mecca. Within a couple generations, the stresses to society caused by these social/economic/political changes had resulted in systemic injustice for the weak, unremedied by the now-powerful ruling class, the clan of Quraysh. It was these injustices that Muhammad called attention to at the beginning of the spread of al-Islam, and why so many of his earliest followers were women, children, the poor, and slaves. Of course, Muhammad’s reforms redressed the severe imbalance of power and accountability in 7th-century Mecca. The Islam he instituted was patriarchy all right, but it mandated an end to the worst injustices under the Quraysh. It remade Arabian society on a more stable footing, allowing patriarchy to endure thenceforth. Muslim women’s origin rights became eroded gradually over the first few centuries. The women with the most social/economic/political/sexual autonomy in Islamic history were the first generation who converted to Islam, e.g. Khadijah and Hind, who had grown up under paganism.
Pre-patriarchal Arabian women had the choice of many different types of marriage which did not necessarily disadvantage them, instead of the single form of patriarchal marriage that became the norm in historical Islam. A woman of the earlier generations could copulate with her choice of up to ten men. (Not all at the same time, that is; one by one.) It would be equally the man’s choice to enter into this contract. The men had to make a contract to that effect. If she became pregnant, she could designate her choice of any one of the ten men to have the responsibility of supporting the child. It was in the contract. That is an example of what I mean about women having their own agency in their sexual doings.
*I don’t personally care if anyone says either American Indian or Native American. As far as I’m concerned (and as far as I have any room to comment on that question), both are acceptable and interchangeable. I also use either who and whom for the object case interchangeably and think it doesn’t matter which.
Even if there were any ancient primitive societies still around, I probably wouldn’t try to do that. I might however look around for one that did not define sex exclusively as rape and all sexual partnerships as slavery.
Theories about prehistoric (or non-historic) civilizations are not theories in the same sense as in the hard sciences. Even if they were, all sciences are strongly influenced by culture. One’s culture does not only affect how one interprets data, but what one decides to measure and how to measure it.
Not sure where this comes from?
I can’t think of a single society off-hand that fits your “define”; but almost all societies before the 20th century had attitudes towards women’s rights that we would think of as “primitive” or unfair today. Arranged marriages have been the norm for a vast number. Even where the girl had some choice, parents had a significant input into her choices. I wouldn’t call it slavery or rape, but certainly in many societies one side is less equal than the other to some degree.
I suspect (speculation again) in hunter-gatherer societies, that it’s not a matter of rape so much as facing the inevitable - if you want to eat, you have to hook up with a hunter. If you gather and store, someone could steal your effort unless you have a common group (family) to defend your possessions.
Like I said earlier, I attribute this to basic human nature; you can spend the entire formative years trying to instill proper values, but some people - both male and female - will still turn out to be assholes.
I remember someone mentioned this about Gauguin - he left for Tahiti, expecting to find a paradise unspoiled by western influences, only to find that even in Tahiti, people argued over who stole whose pig, gossiped over who was doing who, and fought over women. Human nature…
Oh well, I had a gut feeling there probably wouldn’t be an accepted answer or even a mainstream theory to answer this question. I wonder what the earliest human writings that say anything about babies/birth have to say about what causes it.
Could it be that “heterosexual sexual intercourse causes babies” was just a theory up until a few centuries ago? Deep down I actually DO NOT think ancient humans ever figured this out, and just kept having sex because of the instinct to do so, and then if/when a baby was born, the maternal instinct to care for it then took over. There was never a practical need to figure out what caused babies for most of human existence.
It was only within the last 2-3 centuries or so that we’ve been selectively breeding dogs to create specific breeds. So the knowledge of sexual reproduction is at least that old. Just because people 2000 years ago kept sheep doesn’t mean they necessarily knew what caused them to give birth. I bet nearly all sheepherders back then believed that if you pray hard enough to the god of sheep, your sheep will give birth to new sheep.
Emphasis mine.
On what do you base this assumption about family partnerships in older cultures?
Why do you posit that “men discovered that male orgasm was pretty powerful magic”, but couldn’t possibly figure out how the uterus worked?
Do you really not know that a year’s mourning is a modern European convention, that reached it apex with Victoria?
For that matter, do you really think that … actually, I won’t touch that one.
No doubt I will get flamed for this, but I must point out that Quest for Fire is not a documentary.
Yes, the people who knew enough mathematics and astronomy to predict eclipses, build enormous cities and structures within them, and travel across the face of the planet didn’t know that sex caused babies. How obvious can that be? :rolleyes:
It’s true that the fine points of internal structure was not understood. The fine points of the structure of the solar system weren’t understood either, yet that didn’t stop civilizations around the world from advanced calendar making.
Anaxagoras refutes you. Anaxagoras’ Theory of Sex Differentiation and Heredity by Owen Kember. Not only did he understand that sex causes babies, he understood that semen from the testicles caused babies. How much more do you want?
That’s interesting, but it sounds like it’s just some evidence of a guy who came up with the theory… (along with other erroneous ones like males come from the right testicle and females from the left testicle) rather than evidence of general human understanding of the concept. Like I said before, I’m sure there were a few creative thinkers who probably came up with the sex-babies theory. But Anaxagoras is still interesting. I only vaguely remember him as someone who had ideas about cosmology.
Oh, and as for the “humans did complex things so therefore they must have been able to figure out something (seemingly) simple” argument I call bs on that. After all, we put a man on the moon yet we still can’t cure the common cold. We put a man on the moon and we still can’t figure out how to balance the federal budget. Hell, we put a man on the moon and Rick Perry is a viable presidential candidate.
And all those hard things ancient man accomplished took LOTS of trial and error. You only know about the Vikings who sailed to north America. You don’t know about all the ones who didn’t make it and drowned.