I think I heard it from Stephen Fry on QI that it wasn't until relatively recently that people have realized that men are a part of conception and that sex is a direct cause of pregnancy. Before that, people thought that females got pregnant on their own, which earned them great reverence for being life-givers. If this is true, how does virginity play into this belief? One of the central points of Christianity is that Jesus was born to a virgin mother. So did they think that losing virginity allowed for this autonomous process of conception to occur in females? Or were the "QI elves" wrong and we've known about the direct cause of pregnancy for a very long time?
Edit: I'm getting a lot of downvotes. If this is a stupid question, could someone please tell me why? I'm genuinely curious about this.
Oh, I found the same question, that's perhaps why.
This is probably an anthropology question rather than history. The line are blurry. Anyway, it appears that at least some Australian aboriginal peoples didn't know that sex led to conception. They had a notion of a spirit world where the babies came from.
Australian Aboriginal Conception Beliefs Revisited
Coming Into Being Among the Australian Aborigines: The Procreative Beliefs ...