Re: Why were age of consent laws created?

Nah, that's still way too simplistic. Early age of consent laws evolved largely out of religious proscriptions and controls on sex in general, and let's remember that at the time the first age of consent laws came about (Renaissance, if not earlier) church and state were still very intricately entwined in Europe . . . and still are in many cultures. Moreover, the Stead articles resulted in a huge panic throughout society, not just at the governmental level.

I agree with parts of this and disagree with other parts of this but that's not what I meant.

All through that time, AOC violations were charged and prosecuted upon complaint by the parents, and only upon complaint by the parents, meaning that if the parents agreed for the child to have sex, either for marriage, prostitution, or freely, they could override the state on this. The law protected their decision to delay the child's sexual debut or to restrict it to a certain partner, but did not restrict ALL sex, just on account on age.

That implies that parents have sovereignty over the child's sex life. Goethe's world, if I may.

It is only with the 1861 Act, and more so the 1885 Act, that underage sex starts being prosecuted always, regardless of any circumstances. And one of those circumstances being parental approval or consent - as most of the child prostitutes did it with full parental knowledge and approval, as it was a job with lower risks and higher rewards than factories; and many others were orphans who chose it for the same reasons. At that point the state takes over sovereignty over the sexual life of children.

Yes, of course, the panics were social. But the measure taken was to switch sovereignty from parents to state for sexual matters. I am not saying it was a state conspiracy; all I am saying is it did increase the state power in a way that is particularly significant for us now.

but it is absurd to ignore the fact that humans have evolved in such a way that we are generally infertile up to a certain point.

If I wrote that, you'd call Naturalistic Fallacy.

Furthermore, it assumes that the only goal of sex is reproduction. What about the gays, then?

Millions of years of evolution has weeded out children below a certain age being able to conceive because of the fact that giving birth would be fatal to mother and/or child far too often, and even when they are in the early stages of puberty.

It's not about that. Every multicellular species is unable to reproduce until a late stage in development. This is partly about reaching a development that allows it to create a new organism, true, but not only that. It's also so an individual located in a harsh and hostile environment has time to die rather than reproduce. It's also so the individual has time to explore away from their place of birth and expand the species' range. And there are many other similarly subtle reasons why multicellular species wait before reproducing. My point is - not all are directly related to danger to the mother. If I may add, danger to the mother is something uniquely human. That's entirely due to the huge size of the human head. That's what makes human births dangerous. So it's a new phenomenon, developed when Adam chose to have large heads. We could have chosen to keep our heads small and birth safe, but we would then still be more like the chimp nations still are. The point here is, no, evolution didn't make kids infertile because pregnancy is dangerous: kids were infertile much before pregnancy became dangerous. (And of course, pregnancy isn't dangerous to boys either, so...)

Remember, up until the era of modern medicine, pregnancy was risky even for fully adult women, so it is not mind-boggling that many cultures would've developed taboos concerning their young engaging in sex.

Yes, but that also means that every woman should try to maximize their number of pregnancies because others will die without replacing. And maximizing is better done by starting early. So the argument really goes both ways.