When did humans learn that you need s*x to get pregnant?

Question

I know some cultures still do not know this, but when is the first time in history that a human society learned this?

Answer 1

Its an excellent question.  I've often wondered how I would ever have figured out exactly what to do if my schoolmates hadn't whispered it to me on the playground, and even then it seemed anything but intuitive or obvious....although I certainly had been wondering for some time why I was getting boners when Miss Schwartz's bent over.

And notice how all humans need to be told what to do, they don't just "know" it like little mice do, by comparison.

I know there is one African culture that ceremonially cuts open the seminal vessels in the male allowing it to mostly spill out.  Needless to say, they have a fertility problem and go through religious rituals to cause reproduction.

Answer 2

Good question. Unfortunately, there is no easy answer. If we look at stone age art (statues, cave drawings), while we can see an appreciation and preoccupation with s*x, we can't tell if they knew what its results were. I think that once we see humans domesticating animals, though, we can gain some confidence that they knew about the link between s*x and pregnancy, because in order to change the frequency of favorable genes in offspring, they would have to know about selective breeding. That is, they'd have to know that breeding X dog with Y dog would result in an offspring that would have the favorable traits those two dogs had. That might have been as recently as 15,000 years ago. But it might have been much earlier. And humans in some areas might have known a lot earlier, too.

Answer 3

welll people who did not have s*x did not get pregnant and people who did did. its like ppl who eat too much get fat and when they are sick and lose their appetite they lose weight

Answer 4

They didn"t learn, they first have had s*x and they have got pregnant later. nobody has s*x to get pregnat unless they are fanatics, so pregnancy is a normal consequence of the sexual intercource, not a purpose, as some bigots would say

Answer 5

Pro-creation is built into every living creatures DNA. It's one of the basic functions that is "known".

*you eat when you are hungery

*you take shelter from the elements

*you mate to create offspring

It's not something humans "learned"...it's a given.

Answer 6

I would speculate that it was in the tribal stage after the emergence of modern man.

Your medicine men and midwives would have been the first to figure it out and correlate the ovulation cycle and gestation period, fertilization and pregnancy.  

A more interesting question is if they figured it out before or after they discovered that it is 9 weeks for dogs ?

Answer 7

This is an unusual question.

Answer 8

it is from the start  GOD sent ADM and EVE to create and it is the inbuilt natural system

Answer 9

i guess its safe to say that u are atheist huh

Answer 10

If eating is an instinct. And breathing is an instinct. I'm willing to bet that s*x is also an instinct. Knowing that s*x is the reason for pregnancy may not be an instinct per se...but I bet we knew it all along...*wink*

Answer 11

Are you serious???

Answer 12

im pretty sure its just know-able dude, like talking, hearing, seeing, etc.

Answer 13

lol:)  I have thought this many times myself.  Good question!  I didn't know that 'some cultures still do not know this'  wow!  

Thank you for asking this, I'm looking forward to finding out the answer.

Answer 14

No doubt there's an instinctive and hormonal component to the s*x drive. Are you asking how someone connected the act with the result?

Humans in the past were just as smart as we are today. They were also very attuned to the natural world. It doesn't take much to connect animals in rut to pregnancy and birth. As hunters would often kill pregnant animals the process was known to them.