When did humans discover sex leads to pregnancy?'

[MikeH]

Wait... what do you mean sex leads to pregnancy?

[BeBMan]

I wonder when people found out that life leads to death

[MikeH]

So conception is murder and sex is attempted murder.

[Dis]

sex causes pregnancy?

[Alinestra Covelia]

And remember kids, sex is not the answer.

Sex is the question.

"Yes" is the answer.

[chequita guevara]

Wow, that's an interesting bit of information.

Does anyone have a link to an article about this idea?

That hypothesis has been seriously questioned in the last twenty years.

The best guess is that it was figured out some time after humans began keeping flocks of animals. The idea being that herders would notice that their animals didn't have sex most of the year and wouldn't have offspring most of the year, but that for a brief period, they'd be doing a lot of rutting, and then after a certain period of time, babies.

It is believed that the discovery that sex leads to babies led to patriarchal society and ultimately civilization.

[Dis]

ya they probably figured it out from animals. Seems like it'd take a while otherwise. As pregnancy isn't noticible immediately or shortly after sex (from what I'm told- I have never been pregnant). So I'd tie it in with the same time as domestication of animals.

[chequita guevara]

With humans, since we can have sex pretty much whenever we want, there isn't an immediate correlation between sex and pregnancy. People are having sex all the time and babies happen randomly.

Most other animals only have sex when the female is in estrus, especially the animals humans kept. So it would be easier to pay attention to when what ewe was boinked by what ram, and notice that always five months after "Betty" got rammed, she had a lamb.

[DirtyMartini]

That's what people did before the interwebs -- sat around and watched their flocks flock. Mostly watched that is.

[chequita guevara]

It was bout as interesting, too.

[Dis]

sadly some people probably do use the internet to watch animals ****. Or more disturbingly watch humans do animals. Not much of an evolution if you ask me. One wonders if humans are getting dumber.

[MattBowron]

note to AC:

slugs didn't have sex like humans. Most slugs and worms are hermaphrodites who simply disseminated their gametes to fertilize one another's eggs. Penetrative sex developed during the formation of reptiles when the egg had to be fertilized within the female before the creation of the shell due to the harsh dry environment outside which would've dried up an amphibian egg and killed the embryo. Humans however were among the first to ever mate face to face.

[Heraclitus]

note to AC:

Humans however were among the first to ever mate face to face.

Do we have any evidence for how exactly ancient hominids mated? Isn't how the penis curves during intercourse supposedly evidence of how humans used to do it doggy stlye?


And if you weren't talking about ancient hominids, but Humans can I ask which animals have since (in such a brief period) changed their habits and begun mating face to face?

[Alinestra Covelia]

I seem to recall reading a New Yorker article with a photo of bonobos mating face to face. (Well, it looked to me like they were mating. Given how prevalent sex-play is in bonobo society they were probably having the human equivalent of a health care political debate.)