when did humanity figure out that sex caused babies?
It does? I suspect it was figured out pretty early since someone surely noticed that women who don’t have sex don’t make babies, but as soon as they start having sex they get pregnant. I doubt anyone can pinpoint exactly when someone put 2 and 2 together, but I bet it was when having babies was critical to the survival of a group and when infant mortality rates were so much higher than they are today.
I would imagine it was never hard to figure out - only one thing (usually) goes in (and out) and one thing comes out. Plus, as pointed out - when it’s not going in nothing is coming out.
Certainly by the agricultural revolution (10,000BC?) humans were clear on the concept, too, that not every seed planted automatically grows, eliminating one source of doubt.
And again, the children coming out would typically have the same facial features as the man doing the “in” part, further proof of the connection.
Remember, humans were NOT stupid. (well, not all of them, and not back then). Lacking TV and the internet, they spent a lot of their time observing nature. If they spent long enough staring at the skies to figure out which pinpricks of light moved and in regular patterns over a year or years, then observing nature in all its glory was not beyond their ken. Plus, certainly by the time they began to domesticate livestock or dogs, then would have observed the circle of life enough to figure things out.
Cecil says it happened in the Neolithic, when people could observe the life cycle of domesticated animals close up, although he doesn’t give any sources for this assertion. I’m dubious about the idea that people could have figured it out just by observing their own behavior. When would a fertile woman not have sex for months at a time? If people are having sex pretty much all the time, the connection would not be at all clear.
There is no factual answer. Nobody knows.
Quite a few ethnographers have reported (with straight faces) that “primitive” cultures they were studying still did not understand the connection. I would take those observations with a great deal of salt. When some snoopy researcher comes to your village and sticks their nose in your business, asking about where babies come from, how would you respond? I’d wink and yank their chain.
I think it’s more interesting to look at whether or not a culture believed the female to be anything more than a passive receptacle, carrying the “homunculus” (or whatever) deposited from the male’s “seed.” It ought to be obvious, but it wasn’t.
In less male-centric societies than the ones that gave rise to western “civilization” they might have had other explanations than that one.
Otherwise, it is interesting how many questions on the Dope start “when did people first know” and it turns out to be something so basic anyone alive and observant would figure it out easily (we aren’t talking penicillin or internal combustion engines here). Or even, things that all mammals, or all living things, are clearly aware of, or feel.
I guess my gripe (as virtually always) is that so many people seem to have no inkling that until five minutes ago, everyone lived in very close proximity to animals both wild and tame, every day of their lives. They did not see themselves as wholly different and separate from the rest of the living world. Because they weren’t, any more than we are.
/rant.
Unless cultures had young women engaging in sex regularly before or immediately after they began menstruation then it would be quite easy to see that sex is a prerequisite for pregnancy. I think it’s unlikely that was the practice of ancient hunter gathers and this was known long before the domestication of animals.
That doesn’t mean specific details were known. For instance, they might have thought a woman need only engage in sex once in her life to eventually become pregnant, but I’m sure they noticed women never got pregnant before having sex. And I don’t think there were many secrets in small hunter gatherer groups.
It’s been suggested that this is exactly what happened with Margaret Mead in Samoa. She asked teenage girls about sex, and was fed a string of tall tales according to some later, contrary anthropologists.
Male paternalistic BS may be a thing in a male-dominated Christian Europe, it’s not hard to see that children can inherit traits from the mother as much as from the father, something any primitive society may have observed.
( Amazon.com )
I assume women, at least early on, also made the connection between pregnancy and the stopping of menstruation - so it’s not like there was a 3 or 4 month interval before pregnancy was realized, to confuse the issue. The only important lsson is that “nothing is 100%” - sex did not always cause pregnancy, menstruation could happen or not and sometimes not indicate pregnancy, etc. The only definite thing would be - no sex, no preggo.
Even before the domestication of animals early humans would have observed the life cycles of the prey that they were hunting. Many of those prey animals have mating seasons that are predictable, followed a certain period later by the births of the young.
Deer and Elk for example, mate in the fall, gestate over the winter, and give birth in the spring. And during the mating season or “the rut”, the males are notoriously stupid and easy to hunt. Hunting at this time would provide food for those humans to help make it through the winter too. Knowledge of these life cycles would have been critical to human survival. Modern humans now feel separate from nature but these people were not living separate from their prey, they were living right out among them.
Literally the “birds and the bees.” They would have seen the mating behavior of birds, followed shortly by eggs that could be harvested. The renewed activity of bees making honey that could be later harvested. Coastal people would know about the return of anadromous fish such as salmon from the sea to rivers and streams to spawn.
Knowing where your next meal was coming from used to be a lot more important.
Yes. Clearly this part was understand long, long ago, before we could even make a guess. Superstition could have created all sorts of explanations and misinformation about the process, we see that to this day even when we have an incredible knowledge of this process, and yet we still have unanswered questions and have to accept a certain level of randomness. But the basic cause and effect was definitely clear, sex causes babies.
My father, who spent part of his career as a professor, taught in American Samoa for one year, in the early 1970’s IIRC.
He said that Margaret Mead’s book was extremely popular there, especially among teenagers, and that it was a national laughingstock.
How often and at what age did people, and in this case specifically women started to have sex? Was it before or after the beginning of menstruation? If sex was common before menstruation and basically ongoing, it may appear more that menstruation has something to do with it then sex, as just something that happens.
We couldn’t possibly know. Perhaps there is some evidence of sexual activity in pre-pubescent women in more modern hunter gatherer groups. Our views on sexuality are biased by some notions that are quite old, but as we continue to find out are not as applicable as once thought.
One discussion I saw on this went something like this -
For hunter tribes, the tribe was important, so extra children were a task for the whole tribe.
For agricultural societies, extra mouths to feed were a burden for that family, as farming tended to be a family affair, not a village-wide communal endeavor (typically, in most societies, YMMV, etc.)
Hence, the puritanical admonition for young girls to “keep your legs closed until some man comes along and agrees to support you and your babies” would be a side effect of agriculture. A father did not want his daughter popping out babies that he had to feed, when that rightly should be the task of whoever was getting her pregnant. The whole marriage and 'til death do us part thing was due to the need to control the number of mouths a farm family had to feed.
As for age - certainly, families that live in one-room huts or tents (or caves) have limited privacy compared to those who have separate living quarters for each family member. Children would be no doubt aware to some degree of adult activity and possibly acted out this as they approached puberty. OTOH, numerous studies (i.e. of children growing up in Kibbutz life) show that adolescents are less attracted to the ones they grew up with than to outsiders - no doubt an instinctive avoidance of inbreeding and incest. IIRC many nomadic societies tended to trade young women too.
Also, another interesting topic would be when and how marriage or its equivalent evolved. Males tend to be jealous of any attention to “their” female; an obvious evolutionary inclination to avoid supporting someone else’s child. (women have jealousy too but in a different way). Marriage in some form would have become a formal social recognition of pairing to avoid community strife, since fighting over a woman was a tale as old as time… Whether such admonitions about “keep your hands off until you commit to help feed any children” was something that would have evolved into “keep your hands off my daughter unless you’re willing to marry her” is an interesting thought.
Wondering if that may be what we now refer to as the dreaded ‘friend zone’, when a potential g/f starts seeing you as a friend and not a mate candidate.
I believe that the idea that a man implanted a ‘seed’ that grew into a baby was widely accepted in primitive societies.
Title edited to indicate subject. Please use descriptive thread titles.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Not even that would be definite, unless a person uses themselves as the only test case (which has its own limitations). We may have had various rules about sex that would have induced some women to say they had not had it, so they would be counterexamples to your rule, to all other observers. Note that at a time when the connection wasn’t clear, claiming a virgin birth would not have been so difficult. There’s a sort of circular reasoning in effect there.