David Rauschenbach

Jacquetta Hawkes wrote in 1963 that “...Australian and a few other primitive peoples did not understand biological paternity or accept a necessary connection between sexual intercourse and conception.” In that same year, S. G. F. Brandon, Professor of Comparative Religion at the University of Manchester in England, observed, “How the infant came to be in the womb was undoubtedly a mystery to primitive man... in view of the period that separates impregnation from birth, it seems probable that the significance of gestation and birth was appreciated long before it was realized that these phenomena were the result of conception following coition.”

“James Frazer, Margaret Mead and other anthropologists,” writes Leonard Cottrell, “have established that in the very early stages of man's development, before the secret of human fecundity was understood, before coitus was associated with childbirth, the female was revered as the giver of life. Only women could produce their own kind, and man's part of this process was not as yet recognized.”

According to these authors, as well as many authorities who have written on this subject, in the most ancient human societies people probably did not yet possess the conscious understanding of the relationship of sex to reproduction. Thus the concepts of paternity and fatherhood would not yet have been understood. Though probably accompanied by various mythical explanations, babies were simply born from women.