Finally, in primitive times, keeping one’s population growing was paramount, and thus wombs were valued much more highly than sperm, and men were seen as more expendable. It was a simple matter of survival arithmetic: if a population has 50 men and 50 women, and 25 men and 25 women are sent out to fight, and the warriors come back from battle with 20 men and 10 women still alive, there are now 35 women left who can carry a child, and 30 men who can possibly impregnate them (some men will not get to father a child). 35 is thus the maximum number of children that can be born in the next 9 months. But if the group of warriors sent out had consisted of 50 men, and 30 came back alive, those 30 men can impregnate all 50 of the remaining women (some men will impregnate more than one woman). Now there are 50 hypothetical children that can be born in the coming year.
Even if there was an elite woman in the tribe who was drawn to the masculine virtues and just as capable and strong a fighter as one of the weaker men, that was one womb that could not be spared. Such a calculation sounds horribly crude and offensive to us, but this was the basic calculation our hunter/gatherer forbearers made for thousands of years. When the size of one’s village mattered both as a deterrent to an enemy’s attack, and simply the hope that your people’s line would go on, every potential child mattered.
