How “many” societies were found to be structured in such a way to suggest that paternity was not known? I’m skeptical that this was very common.
About nine months after having sex – prior to that he just figured she was fattening up, but when the baby arrived, he put two and two together.
Well, I think we can safely assume it was known at least 3 years ago when this thread was started.
And, yeah, I’m inclined to think it’s not nearly so clear cut as some would believe. When you have the notion of “spirits” or “animus” or similar things, it’s hard to not use them. And when women sometimes get pregnant from sex and sometimes don’t, and when women who are supposedly celibate sometimes get pregnant and some women who have lots and lots of sex never get pregnant…in this case, Occam’s Razor pre-microscope would really lead one to a “the spirits done it” conclusion. Maybe a woman needs to be “opened” by a man to let the spirits in, but it can’t be JUST sex causing babies, or we’d be knee deep in babies!
A little farm boy and farm girl are sitting on a fence watching a bull and cow go at it. The boy says, “Hey, Sarah, I’d sure like to be doing that,” wink wink. And she says, “Go ahead, Vern, it’s your cow.”
Here you are, have a read. There have been plenty of matrilineal societies surviving into modern times. There probably used to be a lot more. Very likely, if you could go back far enough, you would find that all human societies were once matrilinearly structured.
Note, however, that I am not saying that the facts of paternity were necessarily unknown in all, or even any, of the matrilineal societies that are recent enough to have been studied, but I do think that it is unlikely that full-blown matrilineality would survive for very many generations once those facts became well known. The force of tradition might keep the system going for a while, but not indefinitely.
I don’t really want to debate this with you, and I’m not planning to read that 100 page wikipedia article (or however long it is). If you’ll just quote the part which talks about societies where paternity is not known or tracked, we can call it a day. Your second paragraph just reads like a contradiction. “X” probably doesn’t exist, but “X” must exist for “Y” to happen. Which one is it, and what is the cite to support that?
There is no contradiction between “X may not exist any longer”, and “the continuing (or recent) existence of Y strongly suggests that X must have existed not so very long ago,” which is the actual form of my argument (with X=“societies unaware of paternity” and Y=“matrilineal societies”).
I am sorry if the argument is too complex for you to follow (or if you can’t wrap your head around the idea of matrilineality), and I will admit it is only an inductive argument, but I think it has a lot of plausibility.
Your previous post seemed to be questioning whether there is such a thing as a matrilineal society. My cite clearly shows that there have been many. If you can’t be bothered to read it, that is your problem.
Look, no need to get so defensive. I asked a very simple question in response to your post, and it wasn’t about whether or not matrilineal societies exist. You said that many existed and that matrilineal societies probably had no idea of paternity or only discovered it recently. I asked for a cite about lack of knowledge about paternity. If you’ve got one, let me know. I’m not saying I know you’re wrong, but I’m suspicious enough to ask for a cite. That is all.
Of course I do not have a cite directly about whether societies that have no knowledge of paternity exist (or existed until recently).* If I knew this for a fact I would simply have said so in my original post, instead of wasting my time explaining about the kinship and inheritance structures of matrilineal societies, and explaining why it seemed to me unlikely that such a system could survive very long (for very many generations) once paternity was understood.
You asked:
As this was in reply to a post in which I had argued that the structure of matrilineal societies suggests the facts about paternity were not known (or not long known) to them, I naturally took this to be a challenge to the claim that some societies were structured matrilineally, in the way I described, which was the only significant factual claim I had made in the post. Thus I gave you a cite to support that claim. (I do not understand why you put the word “many” in quotes, but I took it to indicate skepticism as to whether there were ever any matrilineal societies at all.)
It should have been perfectly obvious from the way that my second paragraph was liberally peppered with words like “probably” and “likely” that I was speculating there. I still think it is a highly plausible to infer that matrilineal societies are either ignorant about paternity, or have not known about it for very long, but I am not saying, and never said, that I know for a fact that that they are thus ignorant. What I do know for a fact is that numerous matrilineal societies existed until quite recent times (and, despite the very rapid rate at which traditional cultures have disappeared or radically changed over the last couple of centuries, it is more than possible that a few still survive even today).
¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬
*That is not to say that no such evidence exists in the anthropological literature. I think it is fairly likely that it does. It is just that my knowledge of anthropology is not sufficiently encyclopedic, up to date, or fresh in my mind for me to be able to know where to look for it.
Somebody told me one time that you can only get pregnant if the girl is on the bottom. I’ve been doing it that way for almost a year now and no babies so far!
OK, you don’t have a cite. That was all I was asking for.
That’s right. If you’re on top of the girl, you probably won’t get pregnant.
It was also her fault if the babies were girls and not boys, so obviously men didn’t take the seed analogy as seriously as they took their own sense of pride and ego.
Oh crap, I got necroed!
I’ll repeat - I don’t think humans were stupid, even tens of thousands of years ago. Only one thing goes in, only one thing comes out, there’s got to be a connection. Anyone who fired arrows and missed (or hit the damned antelope but it still runs away) would be familiar with the concept “doesn’t guarantee a result every time”.
I guess there’s a whole list of associated questions - when did they associate “periods stopped” with “oops, preggo!”, etc. That’s a more immediate cause-and-effect, although again diluted by the prevelance of irregularity due to starvation and other factors. However, anyone smart enough to figure out phases of the moon, planet cycles, seasonal flooding times of the Nile, agricultural and animal husbandry techniques, etc. can probably figure out paternity cause-and-effect.
(When did humans not only cull for selective breeding but also decide they should put the best speciman as stud? Obviously a parallel understanding of sex = offspring…?)
Didn’t see this back at the time of the original thread. It’s possible and certainly wouldn’t be the first or last time, but if it’s a joke it’s incredibly widespread and long running. Malinowski wrote of contemporaries who came into contact with the Trobrianders who also reported hearing of their belief regarding impregnation, and it was confirmed in other ethnographies of the Trobrianders as recent as 1988 and 1993. It’s probably important to reiterate that the Trobrianders aren’t stupid; they can see that babies resembled their fathers as well as we can and recognize that sex plays a role in pregnancy. They just don’t think it plays the critical role. They believe that the initial spark is spiritual rather than biological.
Keep in mind, too, in the days before library books and 24-hour news channels, people had a lot more time to lie there and ponder the mysteries of life without all-day all-night distractions. I’m sure there were people who blamed the bush sprites and evil spirits when their arrows missed the antelope too - but they were quite aware of cause and effect.
Re the Trobrianders - It isn’t necessarily that they don’t know how sex engenders babies.
Despite the fact that maternity and paternity are well known in our society, some religious groups still emphasize that the baby ‘comes from God’ or ‘is a gift from God’.
Surely it isn’t that far of a stretch to say that the man and the woman provide the, um, physical materials, and the spirits provide the ‘spark of life’ - the essential part.
Yep. Like the guy who sat up all night wondering where the sun went when it was dark…
and then it dawned on him. 
At least they don’t claim the stork brought them, or they were found in a cabbage patch…
I know this is an old thread, but this kind of comment shows how more than a few people swallow every story about Margaret Mead that Derek Freeman concocted for them.
Seriously, you should do a bit of research about how Freeman created the media sensation and how little truth his own claims actually hold. A good starting point could be for example The Trashing of Margaret Mead - Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy by Paul Shankman.
Regarding of the subject of the thread, I believe this is something that a hunter-gatherer tribe generally wouldn’t find out, and the knowledge is a result of agriculture. Probably domesticating animals and starting to control their breeding first unintentionally and then deliberately would have been enough to make the connections.