“President Joe Biden said he would support the use of federal funds to help women afford abortions.”
If only women could discover the cause of pregnancy so abortions would become unnecessary!
In general, women are not good at discovering anything, so perhaps some man will undertake the difficult task.
Yes, because as Stacy Abrams pointed out, aborting all the babies is the best way to fix the recession!
“If only women could discover the cause of pregnancy so abortions would become unnecessary! In general, women are not good at discovering anything, so perhaps some man will undertake the difficult task.”
Two weeks ago I saw this on the website of the prolific intellectual historian Peter Watson, who speculates on The Discovery of Fatherhood. I haven’t read the 28-page essay from 2017 yet, just this invitation…
"Welcome to a special feature of the website. This section explores what I argue is one of the greatest outstanding mysteries of our ancient past. This is the discovery of fatherhood.
There must have been a time, thousands – and probably tens of thousands – of years ago when ancient peoples did not understand the connection between sexual intercourse and birth. A gestation period of nine months was just too long for our distant ancestors to have made the link.
At that time, women would have seemed especially mysterious and miraculous, swelling up and giving birth on no apparent rhythm and for no apparent reason.
But then, at some point, the link would have been made and this would surely have been a major intellectual, social, psychological and even political breakthrough, transforming ideas about family structure, kinship, ancestors, community, heredity, the very purpose of sex.
The argument outlined in the document is partly speculative – as it must be, given the time distance – but it does also discuss quite a bit of evidence, anthropological, biological, archaeological and even religious, that supports the idea and dates the discovery to a specific time and place.
Anyone who is interested is free to explore the evidence inside. I am quite prepared for the argument to be shot down, but would be interested to hear from serious readers who have additional evidence that either supports my line of reasoning, or vitiates it. Either way, I hope you enjoy exploring what is a fascinating topic."
Okay…knowing nothing about the author, except that he is male, I am thinking that the discovery of motherhood was the big one.
The first sexual animals most likely recognized the link between mating and offspring, even though some animals don’t stay together for the sake of the children, but part when the deed is done. Yet, some do. They recognize their mate, perhaps mate for life, and the male helps raise the young, whether hatched or live births.
The male realizes that the female is in heat, and that he must mate with her…which is weird; how do they know what to do…pure instinct?
Early primates that were to become human, did the same thing as their cousins that chose to remain “uncivilized”…I think there is a Gahan Wilson cartoon along those lines. Evolution later solved the big head problem for females by making birth earlier than ready-to-go babies, altered the idea of coming into heat so a male would hang around in a more monogamous arrangement, which had the benefit of keeping a stronger adult unencumbered with a feeble baby that could forage and protect “his” mate and child.
There is most likely much more to it, but this is just my pondering. But, at any rate, I don’t think there was a moment when the male declared “Aha, I am a father to this baby!” We were animals before and we are still animals…and animals did what animals did, some remained together after mating and some split. Primates remained together, whether in harems with a single alpha male or some sort of communal living with females mating with visiting males. That would seem to me to be a short hop to human family with one mating pair.
Again, this is far from a professional article. I am, after all, just one of those civilized primate females, who reads books, but does manual labor. 
Stacy Abrams is…so very special-special. Let her keep talking. Let Joe keep talking. And…his press woman, too. Cute but dumb. And there is Kommie; what would Joe be without her?!
Let them keep talking. Democrats, the gift from the woke that keeps on giving.
This sounds really interesting. The whole question of when, how and why humans transitioned from mere “primates” to the beginning of what would later be known as “rational thinking” is hugely fascinating. It’s too bad its so buried in the mists of time that we may never know the whole story.
A neighbor’s dog was the ultimate alpha male. He wouldn’t allow other male dogs to be in the neighborhood. He would beat the tar out of them. He fathered two pups by a female dog I had, a male and a female. He never attempted to run the male pup off. Somehow he knew that was his son.
Ha! Yes, just like Dr. Strangelove learned to love the bomb, we must learn to embrace the collapse of civilization.
A Little Brandon Book… well done, whomever!
Long association with humans has altered dogs. You are the alpha of the group. You “allowed” the dog to mate with your female, so he became part of your pack. Your house, your land, your food and water, your pack. If you have cats, the dogs probably know they are your/their cats, and not some strange feline that must be run off or torn to bits. The elder male dog protects your stuff, plus the stuff he considers his.
Who knows if that makes sense? Does to me.
Well…I for one, have no idea how I became pregnant three times, but I haven’t for a long time, now. Many years ago, Virgil came home one day and had to put an ice-pack on his groin, and I haven’t been pregnant since. Hmmmm…
I had a male dog when I moved in there and Bubba beat the tar out of him too. I lost that dog shortly after when he followed a female in heat off and got lost. I never found him.
Heavy sigh… True love. True hate.
Wow…the moderator is letting me post a lot today. Thank you.
I skimmed Watson’s book, and I am more certain than ever that he is male.
According to him, there was No Ancestry…NONE…until paternity was discovered. Not one single person knew who their mother was, or their sister or brother…or grandmother or great-grandmother. Nobody knew their mother’s brother or sister or their sister’s daughter or son. There was no line of ancestral link!
Nobody knew that he or she had the very same mother! Or that she had a mother!
Thousands and thousands of years of human activity and nobody knew that they had a link with anyone else in their tribe or family. But of course, nobody knew that such a thing as a family existed…until, paternity was discovered. Isn’t that just dandy?
How did anybody come up with the idea that bloodlines and property inheritance should pass through the woman’s lineage? But, they did in both ancient and not-so-ancient societies. Why shouldn’t they have done so in much earlier tribes?
I just don’t buy the idea that early humans were too clueless to have an instinct, as did lesser animals and primates, that sex and babies were related and the offspring were kin to the mother and by extension her kin.
I obviously have too much free time on my hands today. 
I found Baby’s First Recession on a Facebook page called Your Childhood Ruined which has endless hilarious parodies on children’s books, most of them in utterly poor taste.
Oh my! I love it!
I agree with you, Jeanne, that it seems likely that humans would have instinctively understood the connection between sex and babies.
The part that is hard to fathom is how instincts morphed into “understanding”, which requires a basis in reasoning.
And the whole process of transitioning from “instincts” to “reasoning” took a couple million years, I guess…
What is harder to fathom is how males took over the ancestral line, just assuming that the female they mated with bore his child. The “reasonable” lineage is the mother’s bloodline. The power is through the male’s, and I guess that is all we need to understand about that. That “understanding” changed everything about the family and the relationships of mating couples.
