Weren’t there artists at that time who could draw humans for what they actually looked like. For instance, look at the paintings of kings from the 17th Century or before.
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One way you can look at it is that realistic drawing and painting is a language that needed to be developed over centuries to reach the current level of sophistication. The rules of good grammar seem obvious once you’ve learned how to speak fluently, so children who make grammar mistakes seem quaint or unsophisticated, as their mistakes seem obvious to the more fluent speakers. Simply learning the rules of an already existing language when you are surrounded by fluent speakers is relatively easy and almost every child does this eventually.
That is a totally different thing than reverse engineering a visual language from scratch, which was what the process of discovery of the rules of realism was. As mentioned by others here, humans didn’t have mirrors for a long time, photographs are a relatively recent development technologically. Translating a 3D scene to a 2D surface is incredibly challenging and not obvious at all. How many kids draw in correct perspective innately, using vanishing points and foreshortening? Probably zero. If left to their own devices, how many kids would spontaneously develop those techniques on their own if they were never exposed to more sophisticated art?
I’m a professional artist and it took me years of practice to be able to draw and paint fairly photorealistically and I had the benefit of the entire history of artists before me, as well as patient art teachers. All the techniques are easy available to study online these days, but what percentage of the population can draw a recognizable portrait? Probably a low percentage. That’s because drawing realistically is hard even if you know the rules!
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