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Assuming the imagery in the video is genuine, then one way to make sense of orphan trains and baby-sales is to play around with the idea that human nurturing skills are new. Much newer than convention will acknowledge.
Using Britain and Anglophone countries to provide examples:
In the 18th century you have what appear to be the sale of children at English markets (I'm interpreting John Byng's account of a Bedfordshire market in The Torrington Diaries (Abridged)). Abraham de la Pryme also tells of a child being sold in a pub.
These tales of sales sound outrageous. But actually the practice of child sales is consistent with a society that uses slaves. With a society that trains children to grow up to be competent as slaves.
In the 19th century you have (1) very strong disapproval of pregnancy outside marriage. And you have (2) baby sales/incubator baby sales, (3) orphan trains and (4) the capture of 'native' children for education and work (Australia, Canada, and, I presume, the US).
You can think of these four phenomena together as the prevention - and rounding up - of 'stray' or 'excess' children.
Why did stray or excess children appear in this 19th century period?
Well, 'stray' or 'excess' are constructs, they reflect attitudes. Where 'stray' or 'excess' reflect facts, we're told they reflect facts of war, poverty, alcoholism and poor morals.
However, it is conceivable 'stray' children, 'excess' children and the onset of 19th century/Victorian morality about reproduction reflect the recent delegation of reproductive capacity into the control of humans. Or even the recent addition of reproductive capacity to humans.
If that were true (I appreciate it's too unusual a conjecture to be accepted as true), then it follows that human baby- and child-nurturing skills would likely be... poorly developed. After all, it's pretty clear that previously, babies were sold (and/or bred) for food (as 'grub'). You wouldn't need to train nurturing skills into humans that are only producing babies as food. Nor into humans that are only going to produce babies that will be reared - or sold on - by the owners of the parents.
Except, perhaps, in the few humans that have been trained to nurture. Ie, nannies.
In a slave society, you only need to train humans to manage children in the workplace (domestic workplaces, artisanal workplaces, industrial workplaces (think: child labour in the industrial revolution).
Nurturing babies comes later - after humans had mastered managing children in workplaces.
So what you may be seeing evidenced by the video is the gradual spread of child-nurturing skills through human society - and the gradual spread of child-nurturing skills into earlier phases of child rearing. Until eventually you have nurturing skills sufficiently developed that humans can actually raise babies. Including their own babies.
And this spread of nurturing skills is following in the wake of the arrival (or addition of) human control over human reproductive capacity, or even the arrival of human reproductive capacity.
You also see family planning and clubs promoting eugenics becoming prominent at this time. I haven't time-lined the histories of the various family planning and eugenics organisations so I am going on memory when I suggest they began to become prominent in the late 19th century. Again I suggest, you may be looking at a result of - specifically: a reaction to - humans developing the capacity to reproduce. And going for it.
(As an aside: I suspect family planning and eugenics organisations are connected with Fabian Society/Besant/Theosophy circles. If I'm right, then on an organisational chart, these would all be departments within 'Management'.)
Summarised: child slavery and child workers (for example, child workers in the English industrial revolution) may be children who were bought and sold as child slaves. The later sale of babies may reflect that human nurturing skills had become advanced enough that it was worthwhile to sell excess babies for training by these newly nurture-capable humans.
This is, effectively, where we are today: we rear our babies to work in our current economic and political systems.
I'm not presenting these as statements of fact. They are just conjectures that might better fit some of the discomforting evidence we occasionally encounter.
I explored some evidence that humans (Homo sapiens) are new in Dating the Intelligent Pig. Although, what I really mean is: current levels of human decision-making capacity are new.
There may also be evidence that we were designed in a period ending in the early 18th century (albeit with plenty of subsequent upgrades). There's quite a bit of evidence lying around for that conjecture. If I get enough of it together, I'll publish it as Designing the Intelligent Pig.
Yours, usselo
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