By David Futrelle

Turns out that women aren’t just improperly appreciative of men because back in the cavemen days it was (allegedly) the cavemen that hunted the mammoth to feed their lazy women sitting eating bon-bons in their caves.

Women also don’t appreciate all the hard work that sperm do, swimming all the way to the eggs while the lazy eggs just sit there eating bon-bons in their caves.

At least that’s the claim being made by this big-brained Redditor:

Don’t laugh! This guy has SCIENCE on his side. 17th-century science, at least.

At the tail end of the 17th century, after the invention of microscopes allowed scientists to see those little swimming spermies for the first time, the smart set of the day decided that these vigorous little fellows just had to be the real source of life on earth. As biologist Robert D Martin notes in an article in Aeon,

philosophers and some students of reproduction [held that] the egg was merely a passive receptacle waiting for vigorous sperm to arrive to trigger development. And sperm? The head of each contained a tiny preformed human being – a homunculus, to be exact. The Dutch mathematician and physicist Nicolaas Hartsoeker, inventor of the screw-barrel microscope, drew his image of the homunculus when sperm became visible for the first time in 1695. He did not actually see a homunculus in the sperm head, Hartsoeker conceded at the time, but he convinced himself that it was there.

He thought it looked like this:

It’s pretty cute, I have to admit — look at those teensy little fingers and toes! But I still like the Homer Simpson sperms better.

H/T — Found this one via the Blue Pill subreddit

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