▲ 210 r/AskHistorians
One day i was watching a video on womb envy theory one day and decided to read some of the comments, I saw one lady say that men only discovered that sex lead to pregnancy when we learned to domesticate animals which lead to the rise of the patriarchy some 10,000 years ago. I offered some counter points that was something like the list below me and I just wanted some actual sources and more qualified people than me to confirm if I was warranted.
- How would we even know in the first place, our oldest written and translated sources are only around 5,000ish years old to my knowledge. Most of our non written information comes from artifacts, structures, and bones, no? What artifacts could we possibly have that tell us that humans learned about sex from animals and not previously, and how would we know causality and not just correlation?
- I know that people might not have been as smart back then but I can't see even early societies not having the pattern recognition to realize intercourse leads to babies. Like women who have frequent intercourse having more children, women who don't have intercourse don't get pregnant, the fact that spermarche roughly lines up with a girls menarche which is the girl can first become pregnant, your child looking like the guy you had intercourse with. I just cant see how people of any time period could miss things like that.
u/Couldntrememberthis — 22 days ago