How did people work out that sex can = baby???

[TweeBee]

Just pondering this with DH and thought some wise MNers might know.
So presumably in early human history, not everyone who had unprotected sex became pregnant, like now. However the earliest sign of pregnancy is missing a period which would be maybe 2 weeks after sex during a fertile period and how aware were early humans of the regularities of the menstrual cycle? I'm guessing it was perhaps less regular due to variable nutritional intake etc.
And then it's say 8-9 months after sex you may have a baby.
So how did people work out that you can't have a baby without sex but you don't always get a baby from sex?
Does anyone know?

I LOVE this theory!

I always think this about bread and cheese too. I can understand yogurt being made accidentally by leaving milk forgotten somewhere (maybe!) but cheese needs to be made - how did anyone think of that.

And the same with bread as others have said. The journey from wheat to even a flat bread isn't particularly obvious (at least to me!)

Can you imagine the AIBU for early man/woman:

AIBU
I don't think IABU, but would love to get your opinions, fellow cave women.

The man I live with is so inconsiderate, he should have been a Neanderthal and died out with them.

My belly is growing again, for the eighth time. Some cowbag from the next cave took my favourite spot on the river, so I couldn't wash our cloths in peace. Its a bugger to stop the little humans tracking in dirt into the cave and keeping it clean.

Anyway, man took piss tonight. I have slaved away preparing food.
In he comes , sauntering, like he's billy big bollocks who caught a deer, but all he's really managed to kill is a fucking rabbit.
(How is a rabbit meant to feed 9 people?)
He pokes at my kidney bean and asks if I've put them in water long enough, as the last time he got a dodgy stomach from them.
I mean, come on! He was only a little bit ill, other people who ate my kidney beans died. He needs to be a bit more grateful, doesn't he?

Many (most?) discoveries have been made by ND people. Most of the engineering and maths students at Cambridge are ND.

I think the problem is that only certain types of autistic people succeed in today’s society.

all this stuff fascinates me too
but I seem to recall learning in social anthropology that there are societies still who don't make the connection between intercourse and pregnancy- as PP have said, there are a lot of variables, especially when women in pre industrial/pre agricultural cultures won't have many periods

I can't tell you how happy it makes me that it's not just me that thinks about this and is baffled 😁

I love pondering this sort of thing
I guess early humans figured out weather quite early on but it must have been terrifying at first. Imagine you were in your cave in the middle of winter when it gets dark at 3pm and wondering if you'd get light evenings again or if this was it.
One thing which blows my mind is that the demise of the Aztec Empire was around the same time as Henry VIII started destroying all of the monasteries I would have put them in totally different eras. It's fascinating working out what was happening in different place at the same time

Electricity is the one that gets me.

It appears humans have always at least recognised a partial link between sex and babies.

Partial because primitive tribes have different beliefs about who the father is and other things.

slate.com/technology/2013/01/when-did-humans-realize-sex-makes-babies-evolution-of-reproductive-consciousness-of-the-cause-of-pregnancy.html

Reproductive Consciousness appears to be unique to humans too.

It wasn't until 1879 that humans definitely knew a child has one biological father. Some tribes believe they have more than one biological father. Anyway, those who believed in one biological father simply got lucky in their guess....they had no proof until 1879.

www.independent.co.uk/news/amazon-tribes-believe-a-child-can-have-more-than-one-father-1075873.html

Partible paternity was a more common belief than the nuclear family in human history.

Even animals like crows and dogs can understand some simple cause and effect things, the main difference with humans is that we can communicate and therefore pool/pass our knowledge on. So people wouldn't have had to randomly discover things. It would only take one and then the knowledge would spread and general knowledge would build up too - soaking perhaps was an experiment to try to soften something, or just an accident eg poor rainproofing or a flood, which would then have been discovered that it made things edible, you can then try that with other things.

Some of the most simple and ancient breads are flatbread type things, some kind of flour mixed with water into a stiff dough and then baked quickly. They are so thin they can even be baked on a stone that has been sitting in the sun. From there you'd try adding different things to see what happened and that's how you get to bread with yeast and later on cakes etc.

I can see why the autism/ADHD being advantageous to cavepeople idea is appealing (though I'm a bit grumpy about it because the ADHD role is meant to be be the impulsive idiot that gets killed showing everyone else what danger is!) But I don't think that's really how it worked - there wouldn't be one person figuring out what stones do. You'd just have someone one day be hunting and strike a rock and notice a spark, or some other coincidental thing, maybe small grass fires. They'd then try to recreate this and realise that it was the specific combination and therefore be able to recreate it with something a bit more portable.

Has anyone mentioned coconuts? That's my one. Who got hit on the head by a coconut and thought "I'll strip off all this wiry stuff, ooh that would be a useful mat, but I bet inside this practically impenetrable sort of wooden inner bit there's something really tasty". Who???

Mind you, I think the story about the experiment with the monkeys and the bananas probably relates to humans too:

www.google.com/amp/s/www.proserveit.com/blog/five-monkeys-experiment-lessons%3fhs_amp=true

Regarding deciding which animals to domesticate - it wasn't about randomly choosing which ones from a list, it was about which ones were easy to domesticate.

Which animals could humans viably subdue, enclose, and sufficiently sustain? Which were least of a threat and were most valuable in terms of resources? Which were most common?

This is a good video (see 6.30 onwards for relevant part re domestication - the rest is about plagues):

Not sure and I'm guessing I was wrong, but Ben Franklin and his kite in a thunderstorm ?

Anyway, man took piss tonight. I have slaved away preparing food.
In he comes , sauntering, like he's billy big bollocks who caught a deer, but all he's really managed to kill is a fucking rabbit.
(How is a rabbit meant to feed 9 people?)

Yes, but this is a Mumsnet rabbit and will easily feed 9 people for a fortnight.

From a genetics perspectives, why or what's the point of a woman's hymen ?

ADHD as well. Early communities would certainly have benefitted from a small number of individuals who were risk takers in a way that the rest of the group weren't.

I think there's some very interesting ongoing research looking into an evolutionary explanation for neurodivergency.

" I keep letting blokes stick their penis in me and I keep having babies "
" Well I've never done that and I've never had a baby "
"...oh..."
I suspect it went something like that.

Yes! And also I remember thinking about silk? How did they work that one out.

Ah but @BertieBotts to have the 'some kind of flour' to make the flatbread, someone had to say. 'I know I'll collect a bazillion of these tiny seeds and then pound the ever loving crap out of them and sift all of the husks out until it becomes a fine powder that I can do something with.'

Humans' first experience of fire was a naturally occurring one after lightening strikes. They would then keep this going by using dung which is a slow burning fuel.

But it took humans an extremely long time to figure out how to start a fire and it was centred around cooking. It is not axiomatic that only neurodiverse people are the only ones who can be obsessive in behaviour. These are referred to as special interest.

At present, we don't know how or when exactly early Man used and controlled fire for the first time. We know we've had that ability for 7,000 years and our kind has been around much longer.

time.com/5295907/discover-fire/

I think he was trying to prove lightening was electricity as electricity had already been discovered in 600 BC by the ancient Greeks.

I have though about this kind of thing too esp if I am trying to understand a concept that everyone else seems to instinctively or easily learn about ( mostly science type stuff)
I think the weather must of terrified early humans especially things like the thunder lightning hailstone it's easy to believe why they thought there were gods in the skies.
Even now when we have a really good sunset it's still baffles me as to how people understood how it happened millions of years ago , it looks like the sky's on fire it must have been terrifying especially when they realised the damage that fire can do

Yep, that's what I reckon. And maybe they sometimes realised that the child looked quite like the man who had stuck his penis in, so another connection was made.

Fair point, I need.more focus with history.

Er, you’re missing a couple digits there on your 7,000 years for controlled fire. Earliest evidence of controlled fire is 790,000 yrs ago.

Earliest evidence of hominids using fire is 1.4 million years ago.

www.thoughtco.com/the-discovery-of-fire-169517