© Peter Watson 2017 The story will be told via two narratives. One narrative will be the story of how the discovery came about in the distant past, between, roughly speaking, 11,000 BC and 7000 BC. The other narrative will show how archaeologists and others uncovered parts of the story at a series of excavations in the Middle East over the past thirty years or so, without realizing what they had found, until now. This is a recent story with contemporary ramifications.  Most archaeologists have steered clear of the question of fatherhood, fundamental as it is, either believing that there is not enough evidence to say much of consequence one way or the other, or else arguing that ancient people were always aware of the difference between men and women and what those differences signified. I hope to show that both views are mistaken. One of my arguments will be to show that the evidence for the discovery of fatherhood – and its importance – is plentiful once you make a small number of inferences. In a nutshell, the argument is that humanity discovered the role of fathers in procreation surprisingly late, not until after 11,000 BC, at the time that the transition was being made from a hunter-gatherer society to a more settled, sedentary lifestyle in villages. In fact, I argue that the breakthrough was made only after the domestication of dogs was achieved. This was crucial because the gestation period for dogs is only 61 days (on average), far shorter than that for other large mammals and well short of the human gestation period. It was through close proximity to dogs that the link between intercourse and birth was first grasped (even if, as I shall show, the process wasn’t understood fully for some time). I argue that the discovery was a complete shock to humanity, to those concerned, and one that had profound effects on the way people organized themselves and, equally important, thought about themselves. The discovery, since it occurred at around the time domestication was developed, was in fact part of a whole set of changes that together brought about profound religious, social, intellectual, economic and psychological transformations all at more or less the same time, the so-called Neolithic Revolution. This is what made the transformation so important, so unexpected, and so earth-shattering to those who lived through it. I have set out the material in a series of ‘chapters’ for the sake of clarity.