Question

How did humans find out how to make babies in the first place?

Answer 1

Basically, since the beginning. While anthropologists and evolutionary biologists can’t be precise, all available evidence suggests that humans have understood that there is some relationship between copulation and childbirth since Homo sapiens first exhibited greater cognitive development, sometime between the emergence of our species 200,000 years ago and the elaboration of human culture probably about 50,000 years ago.

Until 1875, no one in the world knew where babies come from. Ordinary people didn’t know, and neither did the scientists who helped shape the modern world. They knew, that is, that men and women have sex and as a result, sometimes, babies, but they did not know how those babies were created. They did not know that women produce eggs, and when they finally discovered sperm cells, they did not know that those wriggly tadpoles had anything to do with babies and pregnancy.

Because everything to do with anatomy was difficult and uncertain, for starters. Studying the human body required buying corpses from grave-robbers, or bribing hangmen to turn over bodies fresh from the gallows. Especially in anatomy’s early years, before microscopes, sexual riddles were almost beyond reach. Sperm and egg, even if you had known to look for them, were hidden and elusive. The human egg, though it is the largest cell in the body, is only the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Sperm cells, by contrast, are the smallest, far too little to see with the naked eye.

Most likely, we got the gist from observing animal reproduction cycles and generally noting that women who do not sleep with men do not get pregnant. But that doesn’t mean that early peoples—or for that matter, modern people—thought or think of the process in the utilitarian, sperm-meets-egg way that the scientifically literate do now.

Holly Dunsworth argues that, of the entire animal world, “reproductive consciousness” is unique to humans. That special knowledge may help explain both the evolution of our taboos around sex and our ability to bend nature’s procreative capacities to our favor in everything from dog-breeding to family planning.