Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

What does it mean to be a father? When did people first start talking about men as father figures?

And how has the concept of fatherhood

changed over the millennia? Augustine Sedgwick has the answers to this in his new book,

Fatherhood, A History of Love and Power. He spoke to Dave Musgrove to chart the story

from the ancient near east right up to the present day, dropping in on Plato,

Henry VIII, Charles Darwin and Bob Dylan along the way.

When does the concept of biological fatherhood actually become established as far as you can tell,

i.e. the idea that a single act of sex would lead to a pregnancy?

Great question. It's a great question because no one truly knows the answer.

The very earliest artifacts of the human cultural record, the very earliest artifacts of human

meaning making seem to represent female fertility. These are a group of figures with large

breasts and bellies that are collectively

called the Venus figurines. They were found across Eurasia and date to as many as 50,000 years ago

and perhaps even more. They seem to represent and have often been interpreted as representing

female reproductive power. Sometimes they've even been interpreted as evidence for

prehistoric matriarchies, although those claims have been challenged and are probably ultimately

improvable. So that's on the order of 50,000 years ago at the beginning of the human cultural record.

Comparatively, there's nothing on that time scale that would seem to represent male reproductive power.

The oldest phallic images are something on the order of 10,000 years old.

And yet, by the beginning of the historical record between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, fatherhood

is already everywhere in everything.

...