That ideation was the conceit of philosophy and academia. And possibly specific to Eurasians.
Quoting your link: "who compiled and expanded the work of earlier *natural philosophers* and the various ancient explanations for the appearance of organisms, and was taken as *scientific fact* for two millennia."
Ivory towers and echo chambers come to mind.
People who lived connected to the land and animal husbandry often had different ideas, often ironically closer to the truth. If they knew of the existence of rigor and scientific fact, its explanations weren't really relevant to their days.
To put it to a point: they knew damn well that if they only had a sow pig, they needed to mate it to a boar to get piglets, babies weren't going to appear magically. Through folk knowledge and wisdom, agrarians knew a pig gave birth 114 days after mating, and they would have arranged netflix and chill so that the piglets arrived in spring.
This idea that academics and the upper classes could be wrapped up in silly ideas and old ways can be demonstrated with the story of Edward Jenner, right around the era you were talking about.
>The record shows that it was there that Jenner heard a dairymaid say, “I shall never have smallpox for I have had cowpox. I shall never have an ugly pockmarked face.” It fact, it was a common belief that dairymaids were in some way protected from smallpox.
But physicians didn't treat peasants, and certainly (up until then) didn't listen to them.
I'd be shocked if hunter-gatherers didn't know that animal babies came from the male impregnating the female. They could hardly miss it living in the wild.
Sámi to this day manage herds of reindeer. I'd characterize it as farming after a manner. The reindeer for all practical purposes wild, yet they are cared for and benefit the Sámi. I expect they know how little reindeer come to be.
Off in eastern Siberia Tuvans were (until relatively recently) nomadic herders with at least one sub group being reindeer herders.
It seems like a logical step from managing wild herds to domesticating wild animals and I'm curious as to why domestication happens in some places and not in others. Then again, if it's working, why mess with it. :-)
> In the 17th century, physician and chemist Jean Baptiste van Helmont, apparently sick of there not being enough mice in this world, devised a home recipe for their manufacture. It was quite simple, really, far simpler than getting a girl mouse and boy mouse together with a tiny bottle of wine: “If a soiled shirt is placed in the opening of a vessel containing grains of wheat,” he wrote, “the reaction of the leaven in the shirt with fumes from the wheat will, after approximately 21 days, transform the wheat into mice.”
Even animals know where babies come from. Like when the male guards his female(s) and prevents other males from mounting them. There's a reason why human babies tend to look like their fathers, not their mothers.
I saw it on one of those nature shows by David Attenborough.
Anyhow, the idea is that the father, in order to provide resources to the mother and child, needs reassurance that the child is indeed his. After all, what would you think if your kid looked like the plumber instead of you?
They did some double blind studies, and indeed babies do tend to look more like their fathers.
> why would it only affect human babies?
Because humans are very visual. Other species are more smell oriented. Who knows if their own babies smell like their fathers.
You don't think they knew where human babies came from, and would infer a similarity?