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To give some context on how obvious or non-obvious it was, Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, which was the same year Louis Pasteur disproved the popular idea of spontaneous generation. That was a theory put forth by Aristotle that (at least some forms of life) would just spontaneously arise from dust or mud.

That theory wasn’t directly related to the origin of man, but it gives an idea of where scientific theories were at the time.

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I prefer to think that Aristotle wasn't wrong, just operating at an insufficiently-complex level of abstraction. Life did / does spontaneously generate, but it involves amino acids and cosmic rays (or something like that), not rotting meat and sunshine. (Wasn't that the experiment Pasteur used? Proving that flies had to lay invisible eggs before maggots could appear.)

I do think this distinction is important beyond how we view Aristotle. Some creationists argue Louis Pasteur disproved abiogenesis (and in their view, evolution as well) even though his experiments addressed the spontaneous generation of life under current conditions, not whether any form of life can form from nonliving material at all. I believe he disproved both maggots and microorganisms spontaneously generating.

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