This is mostly true for Indo-European languages in general and English in particular. Once upon a time, English had a word, monn, when meant "a person of unspecified gender". This became the root of the productive suffix man, which gave rise to such words as workman, postman, chairman, etc. The word woman derives from Old English wifmonn, which meant "wife-person". The original word for a female human was cwaen; for a male human, ceorl, which became the modern English words "queen" and "churl". In modern German, a language closely related to English, the pronoun man sti...

This is mostly true for Indo-European languages in general and English in particular. Once upon a time, English had a word, monn, when meant "a person of unspecified gender". This became the root of the productive suffix man, which gave rise to such words as workman, postman, chairman, etc. The word woman derives from Old English wifmonn, which meant "wife-person". The original word for a female human was cwaen; for a male human, ceorl, which became the modern English words "queen" and "churl". In modern German, a language closely related to English, the pronoun man still means "person of unspecified gender", as in the phrase man sagt, "they say" (as in "you know what they say").

Finnish, a non-Indo-European language, has two pronouns: han and hen; the former is used for animate objects (including people), the latter for inanimate with no gender distinction. Given English's tendency to borrow from other languages, maybe importing a tested and tried solution would be better.

The search for gender-neutral pronouns in English is, as Wildcat said, quite old. The best solution I've ever come up with is a contraction of the phrase "he or she or it". It's spelled h'orsh'it.