Emergence of humanity

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by wolf

At what point was the mechanism of conception actually understood, though? Spermatzoa meets egg and all that.

If you generalize to semen meets womb, long before that. The people who thought about things like when the soul enters the body knew that the fetus grows from a blob with no limbs. Aristotle's idea was that they started with a plant soul, eventually got an animal soul, and finally got a human one. Early Christians mostly thought the soul enters at conception, there was that phase I mentioned when it moved to quickening, probably due to a resurgence of interest in Greek philosophers, and then it eventually moved back to conception.