Where do babies come from: when was it discovered?

[Patrick]

Hi,

I always wondered how and when Man disovered where the little babies
come from? As the cause and the result are separated by 9 months, this
doesn't seem evident to me. So was this known already to cavemen? Or
discovered in the renaissance? Or somewhere in between? And how?

I am not a biologist, so I hope this question is not too stupid...
Pat

[Elven]

Women probably discovered this ;o)
Probably very quickly, because if the cause and the consequence are 9 months
apart from each other, they have a few clues to help them realize something
is going on.
What makes me wonder is, did women told men about this or did they have to
discover about it by themselves, which, in this case, could have been done
through the observation of cattle (this is just a guess)
Noella

"Patrick" <pez3...@yahoo.com> a écrit dans le message de news:
f7a75888.02091...@posting.google.com...

[Beverly Erlebacher]

In article <f7a75888.02091...@posting.google.com>,

Patrick <pez3...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>I always wondered how and when Man disovered where the little babies
>come from? As the cause and the result are separated by 9 months, this
>doesn't seem evident to me. So was this known already to cavemen? Or
>discovered in the renaissance? Or somewhere in between? And how?

Probably every culture on earth has figured out that sexual intercourse
is required to initiate pregnancy in the far distant past. The early
symptoms of pregnancy are evident within a few weeks of conception, btw.
People have had animals to observe as well.

The *mechanism* by which copulation results in pregnancy is something
else. In general, patriarchal cultures like ours view the woman as the
soil nourishing the fetus which is implanted as a seed by the man. Semen,
of course, means 'seed' and the word 'seed' is often used metaphorically.
Matriarchal cultures view the fetus as something the woman creates, the
man's semen providing a kind of triggering impulse. There are also cultures
which believed that repeated intercourse is needed to nourish the growing
child. These are generalizations, of course.

Note that even when the microscope was developed, men saw, drew and
described a tiny, but well-formed fetus in each sperm.

I'm not sure when it became clear to both animal breeders and scientists
that the parents had equal input into the genetics of the offspring, but
it may well have been late in the 19th century. Aristotelian concepts
like telegony are still around, and not just in the uneducated. Telegony
is the belief that the offspring of a female animal are affected by every
male she has mated with, i.e. if a purebred female is mated to a non-purebred
or to an animal of another breed, she can never produce purebred offspring
again. The Nazis were big on this kind of pseudoscience.

>I am not a biologist, so I hope this question is not too stupid...

It's more an anthropological and sociological question than a biological one.