Science Ancient Egyptian Pregnancy Test Survived Millenia Because It Worked - A strange, but surprisingly accurate, ancient Egyptian pregnancy test survived for millennia and was spread around Africa and Europe because it was just that effective

https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/biology-fields/ancient-egyptian-pregnancy-test-survived-millenia-because-it-worked.htm

According to a text written on papyrus from around 1400 B.C.E., a woman could determine whether she was pregnant or not by urinating in two different bags — one filled with barley and the other with wheat. MICHAEL POHUSKI/GETTY IMAGES

We have a lot more in common with ancient people than we might think. For instance, it was as useful for a woman to know 3,500 years ago whether she was pregnant or not as it is today. And though some may scoff at many of the practices the ancients considered science — in ancient Egypt astrology was cutting-edge technology! — you've got to hand it to them: Some of their scientific methods have turned out to be pretty accurate.

According to some unpublished ancient Egyptian medical texts in the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, what they had in the way of pregnancy tests was grain — specifically barley and wheat.

According to one papyrus text from around 1400 B.C.E., in order for a woman to determine whether she was pregnant or not, all she had to do was urinate in two different bags — one filled with barley and the other with wheat. If the grain in either bag sprouted after being peed on, the woman was definitely with child and could start planning accordingly. But wait, there's more! In order to tell the sex of her new child, the woman simply had to wait and see which of the grains sprouted first. If the barley sprouted faster, the baby would be a boy; if the wheat sprouted first, it would be a girl child.

According to the National Institute of Health, a study conducted in 1963 found that this method of determining pregnancy is accurate about 70 percent of the time — not bad, ancient Egyptians! — although it wasn't accurate at all when it came to determining the sex of the baby. Modern pregnancy tests rely on proteins that can detect a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), but scientists speculate that this old-timey test worked so well because elevated levels of estrogen in a woman's urine might have promoted seed growth.

Researchers currently poring over the papyri in the Carlsberg Collection are finding that medical information discovered in ancient Egypt didn't disappear when the Library of Alexandria burned — by that time it had made its way all over the African continent and beyond.

"Many of the ideas in the medical texts from ancient Egypt appear again in later Greek and Roman texts," Sofie Schiødt, Ph.D. student from the University of Copenhagen, told ScienceNordic. "From here, they spread further to the medieval medical texts in the Middle East, and you can find traces all the way up to premodern medicine."

The moral of this story is that women have always needed useful reproductive health advice, and if they have to get it from an ancient empire that doesn't even exist anymore, so be it.

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Very interesting.

 

[Tomboy Respecter]

This just reflects on the futility on being smart and just be right. Even a fun little post about a cool trivia can lead us down into a rabbit hole of bad research methods, bad sourcing and so on. Hell, even here on the farms it would take actual work to read through all the material and make accurate judgement just for one of the major persons of interest.

That's why you should be skeptical of all academics, even if they are well meaning. The only problems they really want to solve are the ones involving their career progression and financial solvency. It's not that they're all evil or whatever, but when money is involved (especially grant money), it's going to get political.

I think the first one to come up with it was Aristotle, who also thought a lot of hilarious shit about brains, lungs and semen

To be fair, they had no actual way to test this shit, so a lot of their biology boiled down to specification, dietary/reproductive habits of animals (along with other things you can easily observe with the naked eye) and folk knowledge about things you couldn't see with the eye or without killing the specimen.

 

[Marco Fucko]

Don't women already know if they're pregnant due to morning sickness and being late on their period?

(And being nutted inside, obviously)

 

[crocodilian]

I mean how did we first start domesticating animals? must of been some real trial and fucking error right there.

To paraphrase: we essentially bred members of a species who didn't immediately panic or try to fight upon being captured. Wolves (as an example) were bred into dogs by taking the friendliest captures, allowing them to breed and getting rid of the rest.

A certain study has been replicating this domestication process for nearly six decades and has revealed it's not as hard nor as complex as you might guess.

 

[FrickinFrackinFruckin]

And where did the Egyptians learn this knowledge!

 

[A Welsh Cake]

Gimme the 3500 year old gamer girl piss bread or I riot.

 

[stuffandthings]

Even the south/middle Americans were quite far behind in that way, just because they had less time to work on modifying the crops.

I don't think they would have gotten very far military wise.

There's a great book called, 'Guns, Germs, and Steel." that goes into how civilizations arise and what is necessary for dense populations or more complex societies. One big advantage the Middle East had was a large amount of easily domesticated grains and animals. So for the New World it was more than less time, it was worse raw material in terms of wild plants and animals. The author went into the number of mutations needed to get wheat from its wild ancestor, vs the number of changes maize had to undergo. He also talks about how much harder it is to spread grains and animals along a north south axis because of the changes in climate and biome. Wheat, rye, barley and rice were able to be transmitted horizontally to be grown along similar latitudes.

Given that they had a later start and a worse tool bag, the meso american peoples were able to accomplish a lot.

 

[Vecr]

There's a great book called, 'Guns, Germs, and Steel." that goes into how civilizations arise and what is necessary for dense populations or more complex societies. One big advantage the Middle East had was a large amount of easily domesticated grains and animals. So for the New World it was more than less time, it was worse raw material in terms of wild plants and animals. The author went into the number of mutations needed to get wheat from its wild ancestor, vs the number of changes maize had to undergo. He also talks about how much harder it is to spread grains and animals along a north south axis because of the changes in climate and biome. Wheat, rye, barley and rice were able to be transmitted horizontally to be grown along similar latitudes.

Given that they had a later start and a worse tool bag, the meso american peoples were able to accomplish a lot.

I have that book, I should read it again.

 

[The Littlest Shitlord]

I mean how did we first start domesticating animals? must of been some real trial and fucking error right there.

In the case of sheep, it was due to empathy for animals and nurturing instinct rather than any process of trial and error. Sheep and goats were both domesticated around 9-10,000 years ago; one of them was second to be domesticated, the other was third, and we don't know which was which (dogs had been domesticated many thousands of years earlier). But what must have happened was this: some spring in the hills of Eurasia, a hunter was out hunting wild mouflon, the ancestor species of domestic sheep, to get meat for himself and his wife who was nursing their baby. He had the good fortune to encounter a ewe who had just given birth to a little ewe lamb. Separated from the flock (since they sneak off to give birth alone), exhausted from labor, and distracted by her new baby, the new mother was easy prey, and swiftly killed.

But this left a newborn lamb, a tiny, crying, completely helpless creature not even an hour old. Without her mother to nurse from, she would surely die on her own (sheep do not generally let lambs not their own nurse from them). And this is where human empathy for non-human animals kicks in: instead of summarily executing the lamb to obtain another few pounds of meat and some lambskin for gloves or whatever, the hunter let the baby animal follow him as he dragged her mother's corpse back home. And again, the man's wife had pity for the creature, and nursed the lamb from her own breast alongside her own baby, at least for a few weeks until the lamb could graze for food.

When you feed a lamb as if you are its mother, the lamb will bond to you as if you really were its mother. In fact, sheep are one of the many species that fail the mirror test, so they have to learn what they are and what they look like from what their mother looks like. Sheep raised exclusively by people won't know that they aren't people themselves, and will see people as their flock and not flee from them.

Family bonds in sheep are strong and lifelong; ewes in particular will want to follow their mothers around as long as they live. So when they have children, their children will follow them in turn, while they follow their own mother, and this chain continues through the generations, so an old ewe who has many descendants will be followed around by quite a large crowd of sheep. And the mother sheep with the most descendants therefore has the largest influence on the direction of the flock as a whole, and becomes the flock leader, and is known as the matriarch sheep.

So, this mouflon was basically a tame pet for the man's wife, and probably would have been petted and played with and loved by his children as well. And this entire time, love for their pet prevailed over the desire for the meat and hide of the animal.

Rams can smell a ewe in heat at some distance, and are extremely motivated to find her and mate with her, so simply keeping the ewe unfenced (and since she was tame and followed her human around everywhere, there would have been no need for a fence) makes it likely that a ram sooner or later would show up and breed her, and then she would have lambs of her own, and a flock would have gotten started, all of whom would be following the human woman around.

Now this so far is simple taming not actual domestication, but over generations as the sheep with a greater fear of humans would have wandered off, or proved troublesome to keep and been killed when the people wanted some mutton, the proto-sheep would have eventually become genetically less fearful of humans. And this process continued for thousands of years, in some cases into the present day. Some breeds of sheep are much friendlier than others. The island breeds, for example, tend to be quite friendly, because they were raised on small islands with no large predators, so sheep that showed too little fear of predators would not have been weeded out. And also, these are the breeds of sheep that maintained a large variety of colors and patterns, and were kept in small flocks, meaning that they were readily distinguishable as individuals to their keepers. So they would have known which individual sheep were friendly and which weren't, and at least some of the time they would have felt bad about killing their friendly sheep, so being friendly was actually a survival trait for these sheep.

Humans did eventually start to deliberately breed sheep for various characteristics, including disposition, and the breeding process was certainly trial and error (and to some extent still is), but the basic domestication process was possibly not even deliberate. It probably even happened more than once, since scientists still can't definitively identify a single ancestor species from the mouflon genus that was the only ancestor for all domestic sheep. And that's not even counting adoption-of-orphaned-lamb scenarios where the lamb was a little ram lamb and would not have had children to start a flock, or where the orphan died young of disease before having children, etc.

 

[Dr. Sexbot]

https://history.nih.gov/exhibits/thinblueline/timeline.html

The article quoted this source. It doesn't give more ie. who and how has done the tests...
Of course this is a reason I am in general skeptical about all science/studies related things I read. Sources are behind 70 different people in a game of telephone that it would take way too much effort and science know how to check and verify things.

They kind of spell it out for you:

For more on the scientific basis for various urine pregnancy tests throughout human history, see J. Burstein and G.D. Braunstein, “Urine pregnancy tests from antiquity to the present,” Early Pregnancy: Biology and Medicine 1 (1995) pp. 288-296. Several entries in the “Timeline of Pregnancy Tests” were based on this material.

...which sure sounds like it would answer your questions. Being skeptical is good, just don't complain about it being work to do a little research if you're actually curious about something.

I have that book, I should read it again.

You should scan the cited section and share it with us so we can learn the secrets of how kangs peed on things. I think.

 

[millais]

Or the moisture in it. Are we pretending that we don't know how grains germinate now?

Why do I have a feeling that all of this "research" was conducted by Egyptologists and not by life science people.

This kind of thing is a major issue these days with lots of interdisciplinary research being published in journals where the peer review is being performed by editors familiar with only one of the disciplines involved in the research. A very scientifically weak paper with a well-polished historical angle is more likely to be published when submitted to a history journal than a scientific journal and vice versa.

 

[Marissa Moira]

I mean how did we first start domesticating animals? must of been some real trial and fucking error right there.

It was all the fault of Dogs.

The adult wolves would hang around human camps for easy food, eventually they got used to humans and allowed them to be closer to them. it is more often assumed that children were the catalysts of dog domestication because wolf pups would be more outgoing and playful and were naturally attracted to activities that early human children were doing such as playing. Eventually children decide to bring a wolf pup home and it all went from there.

Once dogs were domesticated other animals were then tried because you now had a standard to judge domestication and sort of a process. Cattle it's assumed the first means of domestication was to attract wild aurochs with food and then gradually get them used to routine feeding or outright capturing them and tying them to something until they tired themselves out and then it would be safe to approach them to attempt milking.

Mind you breaking the animal played a big assumed role in do,mestication, they were usually imprisoned somehow for long periods of time.

 

[The Littlest Shitlord]

Cattle it's assumed the first means of domestication was to attract wild aurochs with food and then gradually get them used to routine feeding or outright capturing them and tying them to something until they tired themselves out and then it would be safe to approach them to attempt jerking off.

I see furries have been with us for a very long time.

 

[vertexwindi]

In order to tell the sex of her new child, the woman simply had to wait and see which of the grains sprouted first. If the barley sprouted faster, the baby would be a boy; if the wheat sprouted first, it would be a girl child.

That's impressive. Nowadays you can't even tell that after it's been born.

 

[Fareal]

To paraphrase: we essentially bred members of a species who didn't immediately panic or try to fight upon being captured. Wolves (as an example) were bred into dogs by taking the friendliest captures, allowing them to breed and getting rid of the rest.

A certain study has been replicating this domestication process for nearly six decades and has revealed it's not as hard nor as complex as you might guess.

There was a Russian study about arctic foxes, IIRC? And there were actual morphological changes in the most domesticated foxes (floppy ear).

I read once that the first domesticated species were dogs. Dogs are obviously fucking awesome so that success must have led us to keep trying.

You have to think domesticating cats was tough, though. It didn’t go that well for Siegfried and Roy

 

[cactus]

You have to think domesticating cats was tough, though. It didn’t go that well for Siegfried and Roy

Well, it's been said the cats came to us and realized how easy it was to be fed by humans instead having to go hunt for their own food, or humans just attracted mice easily and the cats saw easy prey. I imagine either one is possible.

 

[The Littlest Shitlord]

Once we invented agriculture and started to store grain, the grain stores attracted mice and rats that would eat them. In turn, these mice and rats attracted cats who would eat them. Humans encouraged the cats to stick around because they performed a useful service. Early cat domestication was probably unintentional; cats that had less fear of humans would have had less stress and better hunting. Eventually at some point the ancient Egyptians decided that cats were sacred and actively started to cultivate them.

 

[Happy Fish]

Imagine this technique still being used today and how we'd all be eating bread and cereal watered by pregnant women's piss without a second thought.

Hoo boy.

Do you really think nothing has pissed on the crops you eat?

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Do you really think nothing has pissed on the crops you eat?

I haven't seen people fetishizing animal piss in food like we've seen with using period blood in cooking ingredients and this current rise(?) of adult breastfeeding. We wouldn't hear the end of it if pregnant women's piss was used for growing crops.

 

[stuffandthings]

In the case of sheep, it was due to empathy for animals and nurturing instinct rather than any process of trial and error. Sheep and goats were both domesticated around 9-10,000 years ago; one of them was second to be domesticated, the other was third, and we don't know which was which (dogs had been domesticated many thousands of years earlier). But what must have happened was this: some spring in the hills of Eurasia, a hunter was out hunting wild mouflon, the ancestor species of domestic sheep, to get meat for himself and his wife who was nursing their baby. He had the good fortune to encounter a ewe who had just given birth to a little ewe lamb. Separated from the flock (since they sneak off to give birth alone), exhausted from labor, and distracted by her new baby, the new mother was easy prey, and swiftly killed.

But this left a newborn lamb, a tiny, crying, completely helpless creature not even an hour old. Without her mother to nurse from, she would surely die on her own (sheep do not generally let lambs not their own nurse from them). And this is where human empathy for non-human animals kicks in: instead of summarily executing the lamb to obtain another few pounds of meat and some lambskin for gloves or whatever, the hunter let the baby animal follow him as he dragged her mother's corpse back home. And again, the man's wife had pity for the creature, and nursed the lamb from her own breast alongside her own baby, at least for a few weeks until the lamb could graze for food.

When you feed a lamb as if you are its mother, the lamb will bond to you as if you really were its mother. In fact, sheep are one of the many species that fail the mirror test, so they have to learn what they are and what they look like from what their mother looks like. Sheep raised exclusively by people won't know that they aren't people themselves, and will see people as their flock and not flee from them.

Family bonds in sheep are strong and lifelong; ewes in particular will want to follow their mothers around as long as they live. So when they have children, their children will follow them in turn, while they follow their own mother, and this chain continues through the generations, so an old ewe who has many descendants will be followed around by quite a large crowd of sheep. And the mother sheep with the most descendants therefore has the largest influence on the direction of the flock as a whole, and becomes the flock leader, and is known as the matriarch sheep.

So, this mouflon was basically a tame pet for the man's wife, and probably would have been petted and played with and loved by his children as well. And this entire time, love for their pet prevailed over the desire for the meat and hide of the animal.

Rams can smell a ewe in heat at some distance, and are extremely motivated to find her and mate with her, so simply keeping the ewe unfenced (and since she was tame and followed her human around everywhere, there would have been no need for a fence) makes it likely that a ram sooner or later would show up and breed her, and then she would have lambs of her own, and a flock would have gotten started, all of whom would be following the human woman around.

Now this so far is simple taming not actual domestication, but over generations as the sheep with a greater fear of humans would have wandered off, or proved troublesome to keep and been killed when the people wanted some mutton, the proto-sheep would have eventually become genetically less fearful of humans. And this process continued for thousands of years, in some cases into the present day. Some breeds of sheep are much friendlier than others. The island breeds, for example, tend to be quite friendly, because they were raised on small islands with no large predators, so sheep that showed too little fear of predators would not have been weeded out. And also, these are the breeds of sheep that maintained a large variety of colors and patterns, and were kept in small flocks, meaning that they were readily distinguishable as individuals to their keepers. So they would have known which individual sheep were friendly and which weren't, and at least some of the time they would have felt bad about killing their friendly sheep, so being friendly was actually a survival trait for these sheep.

Humans did eventually start to deliberately breed sheep for various characteristics, including disposition, and the breeding process was certainly trial and error (and to some extent still is), but the basic domestication process was possibly not even deliberate. It probably even happened more than once, since scientists still can't definitively identify a single ancestor species from the mouflon genus that was the only ancestor for all domestic sheep. And that's not even counting adoption-of-orphaned-lamb scenarios where the lamb was a little ram lamb and would not have had children to start a flock, or where the orphan died young of disease before having children, etc.

Again to reference 'Guns, Germs, and Steel.' Egyptians and others in the ancient near east would regularly capture all different kinds of animals to keep in pens and feed, (live meat is easier to keep fresh,) including animals not domesticated such as gazelles. They've found both physical evidence and evidence from art and writing to attest to this.

So in a sense they attempted to domesticate all different kinds of animals, and only the species of social animals with 'tameable' genes that could be selected for became our domesticated cattle, sheep, goats donkeys etc.

 

[The Littlest Shitlord]

Again to reference 'Guns, Germs, and Steel.' Egyptians and others in the ancient near east would regularly capture all different kinds of animals to keep in pens and feed, (live meat is easier to keep fresh,) including animals not domesticated such as gazelles. They've found both physical evidence and evidence from art and writing to attest to this.

So in a sense they attempted to domesticate all different kinds of animals, and only the species of social animals with 'tameable' genes that could be selected for became our domesticated cattle, sheep, goats donkeys etc.

The domestication of sheep and goats predates writing though. Did they find art of this process from before 9-10k years ago?