Aristotle stated that men had more teeth than women without bothering to check. When it came to practical science, they were big on making up theories and very bad with putting them to the test. As for Anaxagoras, I guess perhaps he could have bought a collection of slaves, hacked on testicle off each male, then locked each up with a female to reproduce - a long and expensive experiment. The Greeks were not big on experiments. They were more likely to dream things up in the bath.
However, that’s about the closest we come to documentary evidence the ancients knew the connection.
[QUOTE=j666]
Why do you posit that “men discovered that male orgasm was pretty powerful magic”, but couldn’t possibly figure out how the uterus worked?
[/QUOTE]
Not sure what you mean here…
That babies come out of the uterus? I’m sure even men could figure that out.
That periods happen, pretty regularly for most fertile women? I’m sure even men could figure that out, since it may disrupt their routine too.
That when periods stop, it means pregnancy? Not always; there’s decidual bleeding, there’s early miscarriages, there’s irregular periods for a lot of other reasons - but I’m pretty sure that women, and hence men, eventually made the connection that no A likely means B. Especially, since that characteristic is human only - the cows goats or dogs don’t bleed all over the place on a monthly basis. Early humans must have assigned some special status to the situation.
My supposition is that male orgasm is a pretty powerful event, and probably something that men paid a lot of attention to and attributed great significance to, especially before other distractions like TV, the superbowl, and crack cocaine.
The fact is: that this event most often happened while leaving semen in a woman’s vagina (in the days before taped eyeglasses); that babies came out of this vagina; and almost nothing else went in (that they knew of) - then it was not a major leap in logic to infer that putting something in had some part in the getting something out, even if they could not definitely make the one-to-one cause and effect association. My guess is this connection was made not long after humans evolved from procreative thinking to creative thinking.
Whether they thought “You can’t get pregnant the first time”, or “it has to be truly special” or " you have to do it under the full moon", the point is I think it was not difficult for them that they made the association. Whether there was the odd sneaky girl or wife that confused the issue (“that’s odd, she did nothing but she’s pregnant?”) whether they knew it had to be done within X days… who knows? In general, perhaps periods are to irregular to count on such rules. I haven’t seen (or looked for) any data on period irregularity other than that one article on one rural African village. Whether women (or men) knew what cycle time was fertile and how long ago this was known, I have no idea. There’s enough silly old wives tales even today that any accurate folklore was probably lost in the noise of all the incorrect assumptions.