So about 12,000 years or so ago, the general idea was that women had this miraculous power to make new lives. And the life was put into the woman by whatever spirits her tribe believed in. ... Didn't take very long for those early agrarians to understand that male animals and male humans had a role to play in reproduction after all.
Thanks CharlieParley, that's great.
Of course they held onto their one-sex model of reproduction. Instead of thinking of women as life-giving, that was now the man's role. The woman, as previous posters have already said, was now recast as a mere vessel. She made no contribution to the child other than providing a growing environment.
So I guess to call that "one-sex" you have to use this "essence provider" definition of sex, not "reproductive role".
Effectively the "surrogacy" world view, right? You know you need a woman to play a reproductive role - but she doesn't count.
Anyway that makes the point that people had known for thousands of years how reproduction worked in practice - you needed one of each sex - before the Greek Gender Studies departments came along went really batshit channelling their misogyny ("babies could be grown in jars").
The eye rolls of the Greek philosophers' audiences are not on record.
Fantastic theories for justifying nonsensical attitudes and denial of sex, but I think we can be quite confident all patriarchal societies retained full control of their women, rather than relying on jars... Just as all the people seeking surrogates seem to know what a woman is when it matters.
So basically, before the Enlightenment, we had loads of proto-Butlers and Hines and Cohens, spouting the same nonsense for the same basic reasons; everyone knew there were 2 sexes, but the nonsense was used selectively to justify misogyny.
Plus ça change...