Anthropology

and the only real way to make a decent living was to find a piece of clear land and start working it as farmland. Farming is hard work and once you start doing it, you can't stop and men wanted other males to share the workload and that meant sons. All of a sudden, women were relegated into more of the breeding stock and sons were favored over daughters (men being blind to the backbreaking labor of women) and that's all reflected in a lot of religious texts.

In fact, I think the reason we have as much interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans as we do was that it was highly unlikely to occur. I can imagine preferring a Neanderthal teddy bear if I had just weaned a child and didn't want another one so soon, but.... Our remote ancestors might have had a completely different outlook but neither species was stupid.