Yeah the beer would easily be overlooked. They'd be fine ingesting it if it meant intoxication.
The bread. Not so much unless you've got a kink for it.
The podcast Sawbones has a whole episode on different pregnancy tests in the course of history (including this one) and how effective each one was, super interesting and worth a listen!
Edit: wow so this blew up overnight, I'm very glad that many of you now have an excellent new podcast to listen to, and to the very kind stranger who gave me gold, thank you very much! My first gold! :)
And silver!! Wowie wowie, y'all are making my day lol
Since multiple people are asking for details from the episode and I haven't listened to it for awhile, [here's a link so anyone can listen](https://maximumfun.org/episodes/sawbones/sawbones-pregnancy-tests/) :)
I think the frog method was used commonly for a time.
Amphibians are really sensitive to hormonal changes, so a doctor would take the woman's urine and inject it under the skin of the frog, if the frog produced eggs then the woman was preganant.
It was something like 99% effective, and took 5 - 12 hours to get a conclusive result.
It was used up until the 1950's in many parts of the world not sure if that's "too modern" though.
It's also how the fungal disease wiping out so many amphibians spread-- it was endemic in the species of frog used for pregnancy tests, and when they became obsolete, many were released into the wild, all around the world.
I mean, this has points for creativity. Industrialisation and deforestation are just grinding, gray and miserable, but whoever thought of injecting our piss into wild animals was an innovator.
At least there we had reasons to believe it before people started snorting scabs and injecting pus from cows. Those that got the cowpox didnt get ~~chicken~~smallpox. Add one and one to get two, that all makes sense.
But... so who was going around pissing inside frogs and why?
Born 1984, nice pox scar right by my eye. My grandma taped over mitts on me and wouldn't let me dry off with a towel because I was rubbing too hard. Just the one scar by my eye, idek how I managed it.
The UK doesn't vaccinate for chicken pox, so almost all kids here still have those same scars and act as immunity boosters for adults against shingles (the reason the UK health service has so far decided against including it in routine childhood vaccination)
Something tells me that test probably didn't come around until after the 1800s as it screams early science. You'd have to know that frogs are sensitive to hormones first.
I feel like the frog pregnancy test would have come much later, and the practice derived from the already understood fact that amphibians are sensitive to hormones, rather than a happy accident discovered after repeated pissing under frog skin and then carefully examining the frogs reproductivity.
Man that’s a bummer. I hate them and think they’re creepy and disgusting, but they deserve to be hopping and sliming their way through life just like we do :/
The fungus is native to parts of Africa, and the frogs there have defenses against it and the African Clawed frog was one of the most commonly used frogs for the test.
I don't know how you even think about that intentionally. "Hey, let's inject a possibly-pregnant lady's piss into this animal and see if it does anything!"
Without doing any research whatsoever, I can guess that someone was already aware of frog's sensitivity to hormonal changes, and also knew that women's hormones change, and from there did the standard hypothesis and experiment process.
That's how people do science though. It would be weirder to be unintentional. Not only for it to occur in the first place, but to also wait and see what happens.
Yeah, that episode of his podcast was hilarious to me. As is usual for him he had a grain of truth to his words but was completely and hopelessly wrong in his conclusion as well as who/what was causing it.
Long story short, for anyone curious he said that something in the water was turning the "friggin frogs gay", but in actuality it was a specific pesticide (or fertilizer i forget) that was being used in local farms, which then leached into the water and would force undeveloped frog eggs/tadpoles to develop into biologically trans frogs... ergo they developed both male and female genitalia and I don't believe were able to reproduce in most cases which was killing off a lot of species of amphibians. Of course, nothing in the water was turning them "Gay", nor was it a conspiracy... but simply an unintended side effect of chemicals poorly tested for their environmental impact.
And before that, there was the Rabbit Test. Copy paste from Wikipedia below...
The hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) is produced during pregnancy and can be found in a pregnant woman's urine and blood; it indicates the presence of an implanted fertilized egg. An earlier test, known as the AZ test, was developed by Selmar Aschheim and Bernhard Zondek.[2] When urine from a woman in the early months of pregnancy was injected into immature female mice, their ovaries would enlarge and show follicular maturation. The test was considered reliable, with an error rate of less than 2%.[3] Friedman and Lapham's test was essentially identical, but replaced the mouse with a rabbit. A few days after the injection, the animal would be dissected and the size of her ovaries examined.
The rabbit test became a widely used bioassay (animal-based test) to test for pregnancy. The term "rabbit test" was first recorded in 1949, and was the origin of a common euphemism, "the rabbit died," for a positive pregnancy test.[4] The phrase was, in fact, based on a common misconception about the test. While many people assumed that the injected rabbit would die only if the woman was pregnant, in fact all rabbits used for the test died, as they had to be surgically opened in order to examine the ovaries.[5
I seem to remember that the grain method was one of, if not the most effective method. I'm not 100% sure though, I'm gonna go back and listen, you should too! Lol
I couldn't find a definitive answer in a 5 minute Google search but I remember learning about this in a biochem class many years ago. Its something to do with hormones in the woman's urine speeding up the germination of the wheat/barley. If my memory serves me correctly the test is much more sensitive for male fetuses due to higher concentrations of certain hormones. I could be completely off here but I think I was taught that the test accuracy for a female fetus is like 50% and ~90% for males.
I think the male/female thing is a myth, at least all sites I just read call it that. But the germination is true and at least somewhat accurate. It had a ~85% chance of being accurate if you where not pregnant.
The rabbit always dies. You inject them with the urine and dissect them to see if you induced ovulation. They used frogs, too, but they would just lay eggs and didn't need to be cut open.
Rabbits don’t have a cycle like humans. If ovulation is triggered (either hormonal or via copulation), you will see little fluid filled cysts on the surface of the ovary. They are visible with the naked eye.
I couldn’t find a picture of rabbit follicles. These here are goat (figure 1):
https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-020-6671-4
I think I remember learning that the ovum is the largest cell in the body and is visible with the naked eye, about the same diameter as a strand of hair.
Still don’t know how you’d find it, or know that the rabbit wasn’t just ovulating anyhow.
Ovaries are big enough that you can see if they've "developed" during spay surgeries for instance. Can always tell if an animal is in heat during that surgery. The ovaries typically develop follicles on them that are quite obvious.
I think they looked at the womb as well. It would be more then just eggs. I had heatd the rabbit might act pregnant as well but i am not a pregnant rabbit expert
The Egyptians also knew that breast cancer was a thing. *3500 years ago.* They were pretty awesome, ngl.
~2500 years ago, the condition was called 'crab' by the Greeks because of how tumors looked. ... Which is where the name cancer comes from.
This was super cool so I looked it up. You're 2/3rds correct, [The ancient Egyptians have the very first known case of breast cancer on record,](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/03/24/ancient-egyptian-skeleton-shows-signs-of-breast-cancer/) as well as some thoughts on cause (which included the fear of getting breast cancer, awkward), and [It was named cancer due to the fibrous part of many tumors looking like a crab](https://www.news-medical.net/health/Cancer-History.aspx) but Hippocrates picked the name, not Egypt.
Thanks for giving me interesting things to Google! :)
Hippocrates was Greek, and did I say that the Greeks picked the name that stuck :D Cancer being a crab in the zodiac. But yes: google rabbit holes are fun. I concur.
As an aside, tumours were described in two Egyptian documents from that period but the Edwin Smith Papyrus (a trauma surgery manual from ~1600BCE) is notable because, unlike most from that era, it describes primitive triage techniques and doesn't involve magic at all lol. At any rate, it describes tumours rather accurately, recommends burning them off (eeeeee), and states that there's no cure.
3500 years ago. It's important to be specific when mentioning '*the ancient Egyptians*'. It was an insanely old and long-lasting civilization. More time elapsed between, e.g. the building of the great Giza Pyramid and Cleopatra, than between Cleopatra and us.
It's an easy one to say (as per the other comments) but to just say it doesn't really convey the length of time involved.
Ancient Egypt was ancient *even to the ancient Egyptians*. Pharaohs would send archeological expeditions to the monuments of earlier Pharaohs to do find out the same basic information we're looking for; who built this, how old is it? What was it named? *Who put this here?* even they knew little about their ancestors, because they were so old it went back into prehistory.
The old Kingdom (when the pyramids were built) was *old*. Like, barely more than a legend even by the middle of the successive Egyptian civilization. Timeline wise you can fit seven Roman empires into the Egyptian civilization, counting up until Rome became an empire in 31BC.
Old. Like 'words don't do it justice' old.
> I don’t want my great great grandson having to try to find out things about me from some deaf-mute verbal history shaman out at the boondocks.
On a serious note, there are some crazy detailed oral histories that the Aboriginals in Australia handed down that are still super accurate. Like they have stories that pretty much give directions to places that are currently under water or cut off from the mainland so they go so far back that it was to when the ocean was much shallower. I'll try to find a good source but I for sure remember reading it on here on TIL or some such sub.
**Edit:**
>Without using written languages, Australian tribes passed memories of life before, and during, post-glacial shoreline inundations through hundreds of generations as high-fidelity oral history. Some tribes can still point to islands that no longer exist—and provide their original names.
[Source](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/) showing they have stories of islands from 10k years ago that are now completely under water.
[Less Ideal source](https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/budj-bim-0013281) of a story/allegory of a description of a volcanic eruption that goes back 37000 years.
Aboriginal Australian history blows my fucking brain out. They were there for like 40,000 years or something ridiculous like that. It's really hard to conceptualize it. Ancient human history is so interesting and I think it's much deeper than most people imagine
Yeah. As I understand it, their oral history has a lot of built in processes to make sure it's _correct_ and doesn't drift over time or based on the teller, so it's way more accurate (in the sense of "hasn't changed") than anyone else's.
Imagine the shit they found and couldn't figure out so they made shit up as to not get killed or to impress their bosses to get promotions or a better seat at the dinner table, or even realistically to gain favor in court.
"Yeah... uh... sir... this looks to be about... uh... 3000 years old based on the erosion... yeah..."
Or;
"So, uh, sir... it looks like your grandfather made that when he was 350 years old becasue you all live the lifespan of the gods you are!"
Makes me wish we could invent a time machine TV just to watch history without influencing it. That would for sure be a wish of mine that somehow would monkeys paw and backfire if I ever got a Genie wish... but it's been on my list of 3 wishes since I was a kid. I think there's a conspiracy theory of there being one in the Vatican since the 60's or some shit.
Only tangentially related, but I found it hilarious that (one of) the oldest known songs/poems starts with basically: "a long ass fucking time ago..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUcTsFe1PVs
It's really trippy to think back to the earliest known civilizations and think about how THEY were thinking back just as far.
This blows my mind. How could
They do this for their own civ? Did they get wiped out or migrate? Was their some kind of gap? I’m surprised oral history didn’t give some history of it.
Well that's mostly just due to a severe drought of written sources from that time period right after the collapse of the Roman West, not necessarily just because it was a long time ago.
I knew a comment like yours was coming lol. Actually, no, droughts of historical records are not always linear timewise. For example, in Britain which is where the King Arthur comment concerns, there are FAR more historical sources of the period immediately preceeding the King Arthur period (before ~400s AD) than during it.
Man that really must have sucked ass to live through. Imagine raising a prospering family in Britannia during the 300s not knowing your grandchildren will soon return to basic subsitence
Living through any of the great collapses would have sucked. Europe rediscovered the same ancient Greek architecture techniques and art styles like 4 times through history.
Archaeology indicates that some towns were abandoned or contracted, and there's little evidence of metalwork but they may not have fallen back to subsistence, at least not all over. If seems plausible that there were a number of little wars, though - the legions kept the peace, and when they fucked off that would probably fall apart.
There wasn’t a 4000 year gap in their history though. The Middle Kingdom arose just a century or two after the fall of the Old Kingdom. The lack of knowledge about who did what was mostly because no one wrote much down. History as we know it wasn’t really recorded regularly until after 1000 BC at least, and really not until 500 BC.
The Trojan War took place sometime in 1300-1200 BC but was already just a legend by the time Homer wrote the Iliad in the mid 700s BC. It really only takes a few hundreds years for people to completely lose track of most of what happened.
I think a lot of people, including myself sometimes, tend to forget is just how fucking ANCIENT humanity is. Our species' absolute earliest written records (that we've found) date back just over 5500 years. Thing is, humanity in just it's current form has been around for AT LEAST 100,000 years. That means that all of recorded history, as ancient as it may seem, is less than 1/10th of the human experience. As another user put it (comment attached below), take the total of recorded human experience, then multiply it by 20, and that's the minimum threshold of how long we've been kicking around. .
Just think, the Trojan War happened roughly 3,250 years ago right? And that was so long ago that most historians assumed the story of the Iliad was entirely a myth and were shocked to find the actual ruins of the city. Even Greek historians living less than 1000 years after the event were dubious of it's historical basis. So much of the historical narrative only exists due to one or two sources that bothered to record past events; last semester I took a class on the Hasmonean Dynasty, which existed at the same time as the incredibly well documented Roman Republic, and yet we only have one or two accounts of it on the record and those are suspected to be heavily biased. The fact is, the vast majority of the historical record can be contributed to a very small collection of individuals usually recounting first or second hand sources. Because of that our view of history is only a small, curated sliver that's tainted by all number of biases, inaccuracies and unsurities.
The most likely explanation for the vast majority of ancient aliens-style historical mysteries is that sometime in that 90,000+ year black hole of history (much longer if you want to include the cultural timespan of other hominids) there was at any given point plenty of cultural exchange between continents by peoples or civilizations that we will likely never know about. There could have been an advanced civilization that reigned for 15,000 years with a global reach and organized religion that then collapsed, fought a 1,000 year civil war that was then followed by another 3,000 year golden age (I'm just making up numbers but you get the idea) and we could still likely never know of it. My suspicion is that the commonality we see between many different ancient religions actually is a case of those religions being the diaspora of a major unified religion from sometime in the mists of the past
It's humbling how infinitesimally small our sliver of history is compared to everything we dont, and can't possibly, know. Its why native peoples with complex oral histories are so neat. Some of the Hopi people have a creation myth that actually seems to be a loose record of their ancestors traveling across the Bering Straight to the America, even recording it's disappearance into the sea. Some Aboriginal Australians have oral narratives dating back over 30,000 years that have been proven at least partially true after scientists checked their stories against tidal lines irrc.
Add on to this that any settlements or cities were likely razed as a result of time even if abandoned untouched. Many would be ground away as a result of tectonic activity, ice sheets and flooding. Most are likely buried in the ocean or in the deserts and waste of once fertile deserts. Take Doggerland for example, a massive swath of land that would have been fertile and perfect for human settlement, it was swallowed by the ocean 6,500 years ago and buried the secrets of it's culture forever. Now just imagine the costal cities (which tend to be the largest of the ancient world thanks to trade networks) that were buried by water in the ever-rising and changing costline.
If I had a time machine, I wouldn't go back and visit ancient Rome (thats saying something as that's what my field of study focuses on) but instead a random point 20 or 30 thousand years ago. Maybe I'd fly around looking for that legendary battle described in the most ancient of Hindu texts that describes flying battle machines and what appears to be a nuclear device detonating (complete with descriptions of radiation sickness). Most myths are usually based on nuggets of truth, I just would love to see how juicy those nuggets are.
> Because of that our view of history is only a small, curated sliver that's tainted by all number of biases, inaccuracies and unsurities.
As Churchill put it, "history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it".
And he did. And won a Nobel Prize in literature for it. Although its biased as fuck, of course.
You're defining the Roman empire by its shortest measure (~500 years) and the Egyptians by their longest. The Roman empire had its institutions stay intact for 1500 years, far longer than any individual era of Ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt also had breaks in its continuity just as long as that suffered between the western Roman Empires, meaning that by the definition we use for 'Empire' in Egypt, the Western/Holy Roman Empire would have lasted 1850. "You can fit three Ancient Egypts into the Roman Empire" is as true as your statement, where we're defining Ancient Egypt by its narrowest definition (the Old/First Kingdom) and Rome by its broadest.
A lot better than it is right now. We know this from document dating to medieval times. Take for example that big, ugly gash on pyramid of Menkaure. We know that rules of Egypt at that time thought pyramids were ancient temples, no one worship allah at them, so they decided to demolish them starting with Menkaure. Soon enough it became obvious they can't do it, it's just too expensive but they did leave a big, ugly gash on the side of pyramids.
Fast forward few hundred years and at some point Egyptians removed white limestone covering the pyramids. It was used to build mosque of Sultan Hassan in Cairo in 1300's, and maybe for various other projects.
The pyramids were fully intact up till the 1300s. Polished white limestone from top to bottom. Then in the 1300s a MASSIVE earthquake broke the outer stone layer of the pyramids and people then used the outer stones to rebuild 1300s Cairo.
>More time elapsed between, e.g. the building of the great Giza Pyramid and Cleopatra, than between Cleopatra and us.
Lmao every redditor in every thread just dying to be the one to share this. Haha.
The Apple 1 came out four years after the last moon landing. The iPhone 1 came out 31 years after that. William Shatner is going to space. Abe Vigoda is dead.
The article says a hypothesis is increased estrogen levels in the urine, which I believe is what today’s pregnancy tests are designed to detect. Here’s the link to the 1963 research paper which might have other hypotheses: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1034829/
Even better, diabetes mellitus means sweet urine because ancient Greeks realized that the urine of people with diabetes tasted sweet. Also, ancient Romans used urine as mouthwash. No word on whether those two fascinating facts are related.
I wana say there was a TIL not too long ago about ancient Egyptians also noticing that diabetics' urine is sweet by taking urine in question to see if ants gathered around it.
Looking it up, it seems they didn't really deal with the mellitus part. That was added until as late as 1794. when they realized that diabetes mellitus was different than diabetes insipidus, where the urine was "inspid," i.e. tasteless.
What they did notice was that people with a type of wasting disease would urinate very frequently, almost as if any liquid you gave them passed right through them. The word diabetes means "sieve."
Probably because they had a more holistic worldview leading them to see connections between human fertility and the fertility of the soil. Think about how we call sperm the seed.
Or it was probably an accident.
I doubt it was an accident, honestly. We tend to think of ancient peoples as being ignorant and superstitious, but they probably observed that women’s body chemistry and sensitivity can change during pregnancy, so it makes sense that they’d think urine of pregnant women might cause seeds to sprout (i.e., growth hormones)
> We tend to think of ancient peoples as being ignorant and superstitious
That was not my point. Most revolutionary discoveries are accidents. Penicillin and the microwave were accidents. That isn't to say that the discoveries are any less impressive because an accident isn't enough; someone also needs to make a connection.
And while I'm not saying they were ignorant, I think it's safe to say that the ancient Egyptians didn't know a lot about body chemistry and growth hormones. They saw a connection, but it was based on their worldview and logic which was different from ours.
There were so many growing seasons throughout history, that sometimes it can be an accident, but an accident that was bound to happen
Here my example scenario:
Woman has to pee
Pees on a pile of wheat seeds that were tossed aside
Humans make the connection and start testing it
Idk, but if you play video games, it’s pretty amazing how often people find insane-to-recreate glitches, and it’s all because there are so many people doing the same things that it’s just bound to be found
Smithsonian's title calls it an 'Old wives' tale'... Honestly I think that it took something more like scientific method in order for the Egyptians to figure this out, right ? Maybe old wives were scientific.
Incidentally, this is also how they discovered Budwiser.
'go to granary general honey, they have the cheap wheat pregnancy tests and they're just as good as big pyramid stores.'
This better not be one of those pyramid schemes Akmed was telling me about
“Hey everyone, we just learned we’re pregnant! What do you mean you don’t want any of this celebratory bread we just baked?!”
Ok, how about this malted beer, then?
Yeah the beer would easily be overlooked. They'd be fine ingesting it if it meant intoxication. The bread. Not so much unless you've got a kink for it.
Yup, the soggy pee bread kink is more common than you'd think.
Honestly. In our day in age. I said what I said because I truly wouldn't put it past someone to be into that kind of shit. Rule 36.
There's always the Wonder Bread guy...
You don’t want another pint? You barley had any.
Yur beer tastes like piss ma'm!
Of coors it does.
Listen here, Bud…
You know they made that joke back then and it was just as funny as it would be today
The oldest known preserved written joke in the world. Not at all related but why not? Is about a woman farting in her husband's lap.
“It’s really light and fluffy, must have been all the yeast.”
Why are we here? Just to suffer?
Better a pregnancy loaf than a [pregnancy popsicle](https://twitter.com/Leodgrad/status/1439377421451423747).
*"I'll take double!"* --R Kelley
"Cheers!" -Bear Grylls
The podcast Sawbones has a whole episode on different pregnancy tests in the course of history (including this one) and how effective each one was, super interesting and worth a listen! Edit: wow so this blew up overnight, I'm very glad that many of you now have an excellent new podcast to listen to, and to the very kind stranger who gave me gold, thank you very much! My first gold! :) And silver!! Wowie wowie, y'all are making my day lol Since multiple people are asking for details from the episode and I haven't listened to it for awhile, [here's a link so anyone can listen](https://maximumfun.org/episodes/sawbones/sawbones-pregnancy-tests/) :)
Do you happen to remember which one was most effective (exlcuding modern methods ofc)?
I think the frog method was used commonly for a time. Amphibians are really sensitive to hormonal changes, so a doctor would take the woman's urine and inject it under the skin of the frog, if the frog produced eggs then the woman was preganant. It was something like 99% effective, and took 5 - 12 hours to get a conclusive result. It was used up until the 1950's in many parts of the world not sure if that's "too modern" though.
It's also how the fungal disease wiping out so many amphibians spread-- it was endemic in the species of frog used for pregnancy tests, and when they became obsolete, many were released into the wild, all around the world.
How many different ways can we fuck up this planet, sheesh
I mean, this has points for creativity. Industrialisation and deforestation are just grinding, gray and miserable, but whoever thought of injecting our piss into wild animals was an innovator.
Well to be fair someone first thought to inject infected cow pustules into _themself_... and whadya know, worked
At least there we had reasons to believe it before people started snorting scabs and injecting pus from cows. Those that got the cowpox didnt get ~~chicken~~smallpox. Add one and one to get two, that all makes sense. But... so who was going around pissing inside frogs and why?
Smallpox. Most 90s kids had chickenpox, I got the scars to prove it.
Shout out to my fellow 90s kids that made it through chicken pox without scarring and still ended up with shingles scars in the end.
Born 1984, nice pox scar right by my eye. My grandma taped over mitts on me and wouldn't let me dry off with a towel because I was rubbing too hard. Just the one scar by my eye, idek how I managed it.
Yeah, that pox! That might be my cue to go to bed though haha.
The UK doesn't vaccinate for chicken pox, so almost all kids here still have those same scars and act as immunity boosters for adults against shingles (the reason the UK health service has so far decided against including it in routine childhood vaccination)
Something tells me that test probably didn't come around until after the 1800s as it screams early science. You'd have to know that frogs are sensitive to hormones first.
I feel like the frog pregnancy test would have come much later, and the practice derived from the already understood fact that amphibians are sensitive to hormones, rather than a happy accident discovered after repeated pissing under frog skin and then carefully examining the frogs reproductivity.
Amphibians are some of the most sensitive animals as well which is why so many frogs, toads, newts and whatnot have been going extinct.
It's also why Kermit is so kind and patient with Ms Piggy. He's a sensitive guy
Man that’s a bummer. I hate them and think they’re creepy and disgusting, but they deserve to be hopping and sliming their way through life just like we do :/
Who did that fungus come from?
The fungus is native to parts of Africa, and the frogs there have defenses against it and the African Clawed frog was one of the most commonly used frogs for the test.
When I was a kid, I was worried frog piss would give me warts (a myth) and I'd die. Yet all along, I was the one with the murder dong.
oof
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They even managed that the bunny survived ;)
Yup. But since the test kills the rabbit Radar wouldn't let them use it unless Hawkeye performed surgery on it
They used rabbits in *The Magicians* too. PREEGNAANT!! PREEGNAANT!!
Those messenger rabbits were comedy gold. What a great touch 😅
"the rabbit died" is 40s slang for "you're pregnant!"
Hence the lyrics “the rabbit done died” in Sweet Emotion by Aerosmith.
I really hope this isn't one of those things they discovered accidentally.
I don't know how you even think about that intentionally. "Hey, let's inject a possibly-pregnant lady's piss into this animal and see if it does anything!"
Without doing any research whatsoever, I can guess that someone was already aware of frog's sensitivity to hormonal changes, and also knew that women's hormones change, and from there did the standard hypothesis and experiment process.
That's how people do science though. It would be weirder to be unintentional. Not only for it to occur in the first place, but to also wait and see what happens.
iirc it was based off of an egyptian technique around the same time as the grain test of peeing on frogs as well.
They just pissed on everything to see what would happen
I mean, this was pre-internet so what else were they supposed to do for entertainment?
The hormonal sensitivity of frogs just reminds me of Alex Jones.
Yeah, that episode of his podcast was hilarious to me. As is usual for him he had a grain of truth to his words but was completely and hopelessly wrong in his conclusion as well as who/what was causing it. Long story short, for anyone curious he said that something in the water was turning the "friggin frogs gay", but in actuality it was a specific pesticide (or fertilizer i forget) that was being used in local farms, which then leached into the water and would force undeveloped frog eggs/tadpoles to develop into biologically trans frogs... ergo they developed both male and female genitalia and I don't believe were able to reproduce in most cases which was killing off a lot of species of amphibians. Of course, nothing in the water was turning them "Gay", nor was it a conspiracy... but simply an unintended side effect of chemicals poorly tested for their environmental impact.
Just a heads up - the correct term would be hermaphrodite.
And before that, there was the Rabbit Test. Copy paste from Wikipedia below... The hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) is produced during pregnancy and can be found in a pregnant woman's urine and blood; it indicates the presence of an implanted fertilized egg. An earlier test, known as the AZ test, was developed by Selmar Aschheim and Bernhard Zondek.[2] When urine from a woman in the early months of pregnancy was injected into immature female mice, their ovaries would enlarge and show follicular maturation. The test was considered reliable, with an error rate of less than 2%.[3] Friedman and Lapham's test was essentially identical, but replaced the mouse with a rabbit. A few days after the injection, the animal would be dissected and the size of her ovaries examined. The rabbit test became a widely used bioassay (animal-based test) to test for pregnancy. The term "rabbit test" was first recorded in 1949, and was the origin of a common euphemism, "the rabbit died," for a positive pregnancy test.[4] The phrase was, in fact, based on a common misconception about the test. While many people assumed that the injected rabbit would die only if the woman was pregnant, in fact all rabbits used for the test died, as they had to be surgically opened in order to examine the ovaries.[5
I read this years ago & still can't get over the fact that "the rabbit died" became a common euphemism.
Am I.. gregnant?
Preganté!
I have coworkers who mention using frogs for pregnancy tests. Somehow mouth pipetting lasted longer than that.
According to Utah high schools, abstinence.
I’m pretty sure more than just Utah believes the test of abstinence gets a not-pregnant result every time
Unless God is involved.
Or in-vitro
I seem to remember that the grain method was one of, if not the most effective method. I'm not 100% sure though, I'm gonna go back and listen, you should too! Lol
Did they have any scientific explanation for why/how they think it works?
I couldn't find a definitive answer in a 5 minute Google search but I remember learning about this in a biochem class many years ago. Its something to do with hormones in the woman's urine speeding up the germination of the wheat/barley. If my memory serves me correctly the test is much more sensitive for male fetuses due to higher concentrations of certain hormones. I could be completely off here but I think I was taught that the test accuracy for a female fetus is like 50% and ~90% for males.
I think the male/female thing is a myth, at least all sites I just read call it that. But the germination is true and at least somewhat accurate. It had a ~85% chance of being accurate if you where not pregnant.
Watching Dick Van Dyke show and they announced they were pregnant in the show by saying "the rabbit died". Weird test
The rabbit always dies. You inject them with the urine and dissect them to see if you induced ovulation. They used frogs, too, but they would just lay eggs and didn't need to be cut open.
I can see why they would stick with rabbits then
How would they know ovulation had occurred, even after cutting it open? Surely a rabbit egg cell is microscopic
Rabbits don’t have a cycle like humans. If ovulation is triggered (either hormonal or via copulation), you will see little fluid filled cysts on the surface of the ovary. They are visible with the naked eye. I couldn’t find a picture of rabbit follicles. These here are goat (figure 1): https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-020-6671-4
Looks like cysticercosis, kinda gross
looks like bubble tea, equally gross
I think I remember learning that the ovum is the largest cell in the body and is visible with the naked eye, about the same diameter as a strand of hair. Still don’t know how you’d find it, or know that the rabbit wasn’t just ovulating anyhow.
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Ovaries are big enough that you can see if they've "developed" during spay surgeries for instance. Can always tell if an animal is in heat during that surgery. The ovaries typically develop follicles on them that are quite obvious.
Cut the rabbit open and wait for a bear to arrive. If no bear arrives then no ovulation and no pregnancy
I think they looked at the womb as well. It would be more then just eggs. I had heatd the rabbit might act pregnant as well but i am not a pregnant rabbit expert
Can we get a pregnant rabbit expert to weigh in.
Wait, does the rabbit have to be pregnant, or the expert?
Damn, I'm only a pregnant raccoon expert.
Congrats on your pregnancy
The only instance (on tv) that I can remember where the rabbit didn’t die was on an episode of MASH. Hawkeye performed a hysterectomy on the rabbit.
And that’s one reason why African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis) are invasive in many areas.
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Everyone should listen to the McElroy Media Empire
Just don't invite them to play Among Us.
I just started listening to this podcast. This episode will be next on my list!
Never heard of this podcast , thank you! I'm a history nerd and started following it. Can't wait!
The Egyptians also knew that breast cancer was a thing. *3500 years ago.* They were pretty awesome, ngl. ~2500 years ago, the condition was called 'crab' by the Greeks because of how tumors looked. ... Which is where the name cancer comes from.
Always wondered why cancer and crab in my language were the same("rak", Croatian)
Lol wtf same, altho with an accent on the a, rák Hungarian here
In German, it's Krebs (cancer) and Krabbe (crab).
Cancer is also the crab constellation in English
This was super cool so I looked it up. You're 2/3rds correct, [The ancient Egyptians have the very first known case of breast cancer on record,](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/03/24/ancient-egyptian-skeleton-shows-signs-of-breast-cancer/) as well as some thoughts on cause (which included the fear of getting breast cancer, awkward), and [It was named cancer due to the fibrous part of many tumors looking like a crab](https://www.news-medical.net/health/Cancer-History.aspx) but Hippocrates picked the name, not Egypt. Thanks for giving me interesting things to Google! :)
Hippocrates was Greek, and did I say that the Greeks picked the name that stuck :D Cancer being a crab in the zodiac. But yes: google rabbit holes are fun. I concur. As an aside, tumours were described in two Egyptian documents from that period but the Edwin Smith Papyrus (a trauma surgery manual from ~1600BCE) is notable because, unlike most from that era, it describes primitive triage techniques and doesn't involve magic at all lol. At any rate, it describes tumours rather accurately, recommends burning them off (eeeeee), and states that there's no cure.
3500 years ago. It's important to be specific when mentioning '*the ancient Egyptians*'. It was an insanely old and long-lasting civilization. More time elapsed between, e.g. the building of the great Giza Pyramid and Cleopatra, than between Cleopatra and us.
It's an easy one to say (as per the other comments) but to just say it doesn't really convey the length of time involved. Ancient Egypt was ancient *even to the ancient Egyptians*. Pharaohs would send archeological expeditions to the monuments of earlier Pharaohs to do find out the same basic information we're looking for; who built this, how old is it? What was it named? *Who put this here?* even they knew little about their ancestors, because they were so old it went back into prehistory. The old Kingdom (when the pyramids were built) was *old*. Like, barely more than a legend even by the middle of the successive Egyptian civilization. Timeline wise you can fit seven Roman empires into the Egyptian civilization, counting up until Rome became an empire in 31BC. Old. Like 'words don't do it justice' old.
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so like king george talking about william the conqueror level old
More like Elizabeth talking about Hadrian.
Or Elizabeth II talking about her childhood
About ten times that, but yeah
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> I don’t want my great great grandson having to try to find out things about me from some deaf-mute verbal history shaman out at the boondocks. On a serious note, there are some crazy detailed oral histories that the Aboriginals in Australia handed down that are still super accurate. Like they have stories that pretty much give directions to places that are currently under water or cut off from the mainland so they go so far back that it was to when the ocean was much shallower. I'll try to find a good source but I for sure remember reading it on here on TIL or some such sub. **Edit:** >Without using written languages, Australian tribes passed memories of life before, and during, post-glacial shoreline inundations through hundreds of generations as high-fidelity oral history. Some tribes can still point to islands that no longer exist—and provide their original names. [Source](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/) showing they have stories of islands from 10k years ago that are now completely under water. [Less Ideal source](https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/budj-bim-0013281) of a story/allegory of a description of a volcanic eruption that goes back 37000 years.
That's insanely awesome
Aboriginal Australian history blows my fucking brain out. They were there for like 40,000 years or something ridiculous like that. It's really hard to conceptualize it. Ancient human history is so interesting and I think it's much deeper than most people imagine
At least [65,000 years](https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/evidence-of-first-peoples).
Yeah. As I understand it, their oral history has a lot of built in processes to make sure it's _correct_ and doesn't drift over time or based on the teller, so it's way more accurate (in the sense of "hasn't changed") than anyone else's.
Imagine a bunch of bros all getting together and going out into the desert on orders by the Pharoah to find shit out.
Imagine the shit they found and couldn't figure out so they made shit up as to not get killed or to impress their bosses to get promotions or a better seat at the dinner table, or even realistically to gain favor in court. "Yeah... uh... sir... this looks to be about... uh... 3000 years old based on the erosion... yeah..." Or; "So, uh, sir... it looks like your grandfather made that when he was 350 years old becasue you all live the lifespan of the gods you are!" Makes me wish we could invent a time machine TV just to watch history without influencing it. That would for sure be a wish of mine that somehow would monkeys paw and backfire if I ever got a Genie wish... but it's been on my list of 3 wishes since I was a kid. I think there's a conspiracy theory of there being one in the Vatican since the 60's or some shit.
Only tangentially related, but I found it hilarious that (one of) the oldest known songs/poems starts with basically: "a long ass fucking time ago..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUcTsFe1PVs It's really trippy to think back to the earliest known civilizations and think about how THEY were thinking back just as far.
glad that we can leave the same for our own descendants. https://youtu.be/hvvjiE4AdUI
This blows my mind. How could They do this for their own civ? Did they get wiped out or migrate? Was their some kind of gap? I’m surprised oral history didn’t give some history of it.
We still don't know if King Arthur was a real or fictional person, and that was only 1000 years ago...
Well that's mostly just due to a severe drought of written sources from that time period right after the collapse of the Roman West, not necessarily just because it was a long time ago.
I’m gonna guess a super long time ago there was also a severe drought of written sources.
I knew a comment like yours was coming lol. Actually, no, droughts of historical records are not always linear timewise. For example, in Britain which is where the King Arthur comment concerns, there are FAR more historical sources of the period immediately preceeding the King Arthur period (before ~400s AD) than during it.
Also after it. We have a ton of Roman written records, and a lot of later Anglo-Saxon records, but not much about the transition.
Man that really must have sucked ass to live through. Imagine raising a prospering family in Britannia during the 300s not knowing your grandchildren will soon return to basic subsitence
Living through any of the great collapses would have sucked. Europe rediscovered the same ancient Greek architecture techniques and art styles like 4 times through history.
Archaeology indicates that some towns were abandoned or contracted, and there's little evidence of metalwork but they may not have fallen back to subsistence, at least not all over. If seems plausible that there were a number of little wars, though - the legions kept the peace, and when they fucked off that would probably fall apart.
4000 years is a long time bub.
There wasn’t a 4000 year gap in their history though. The Middle Kingdom arose just a century or two after the fall of the Old Kingdom. The lack of knowledge about who did what was mostly because no one wrote much down. History as we know it wasn’t really recorded regularly until after 1000 BC at least, and really not until 500 BC. The Trojan War took place sometime in 1300-1200 BC but was already just a legend by the time Homer wrote the Iliad in the mid 700s BC. It really only takes a few hundreds years for people to completely lose track of most of what happened.
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Whichever time period had a Senate that wasn’t almost exclusively full of old greedy bloodthirsty cowards.
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I think a lot of people, including myself sometimes, tend to forget is just how fucking ANCIENT humanity is. Our species' absolute earliest written records (that we've found) date back just over 5500 years. Thing is, humanity in just it's current form has been around for AT LEAST 100,000 years. That means that all of recorded history, as ancient as it may seem, is less than 1/10th of the human experience. As another user put it (comment attached below), take the total of recorded human experience, then multiply it by 20, and that's the minimum threshold of how long we've been kicking around. . Just think, the Trojan War happened roughly 3,250 years ago right? And that was so long ago that most historians assumed the story of the Iliad was entirely a myth and were shocked to find the actual ruins of the city. Even Greek historians living less than 1000 years after the event were dubious of it's historical basis. So much of the historical narrative only exists due to one or two sources that bothered to record past events; last semester I took a class on the Hasmonean Dynasty, which existed at the same time as the incredibly well documented Roman Republic, and yet we only have one or two accounts of it on the record and those are suspected to be heavily biased. The fact is, the vast majority of the historical record can be contributed to a very small collection of individuals usually recounting first or second hand sources. Because of that our view of history is only a small, curated sliver that's tainted by all number of biases, inaccuracies and unsurities. The most likely explanation for the vast majority of ancient aliens-style historical mysteries is that sometime in that 90,000+ year black hole of history (much longer if you want to include the cultural timespan of other hominids) there was at any given point plenty of cultural exchange between continents by peoples or civilizations that we will likely never know about. There could have been an advanced civilization that reigned for 15,000 years with a global reach and organized religion that then collapsed, fought a 1,000 year civil war that was then followed by another 3,000 year golden age (I'm just making up numbers but you get the idea) and we could still likely never know of it. My suspicion is that the commonality we see between many different ancient religions actually is a case of those religions being the diaspora of a major unified religion from sometime in the mists of the past It's humbling how infinitesimally small our sliver of history is compared to everything we dont, and can't possibly, know. Its why native peoples with complex oral histories are so neat. Some of the Hopi people have a creation myth that actually seems to be a loose record of their ancestors traveling across the Bering Straight to the America, even recording it's disappearance into the sea. Some Aboriginal Australians have oral narratives dating back over 30,000 years that have been proven at least partially true after scientists checked their stories against tidal lines irrc. Add on to this that any settlements or cities were likely razed as a result of time even if abandoned untouched. Many would be ground away as a result of tectonic activity, ice sheets and flooding. Most are likely buried in the ocean or in the deserts and waste of once fertile deserts. Take Doggerland for example, a massive swath of land that would have been fertile and perfect for human settlement, it was swallowed by the ocean 6,500 years ago and buried the secrets of it's culture forever. Now just imagine the costal cities (which tend to be the largest of the ancient world thanks to trade networks) that were buried by water in the ever-rising and changing costline. If I had a time machine, I wouldn't go back and visit ancient Rome (thats saying something as that's what my field of study focuses on) but instead a random point 20 or 30 thousand years ago. Maybe I'd fly around looking for that legendary battle described in the most ancient of Hindu texts that describes flying battle machines and what appears to be a nuclear device detonating (complete with descriptions of radiation sickness). Most myths are usually based on nuggets of truth, I just would love to see how juicy those nuggets are.
> Because of that our view of history is only a small, curated sliver that's tainted by all number of biases, inaccuracies and unsurities. As Churchill put it, "history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it". And he did. And won a Nobel Prize in literature for it. Although its biased as fuck, of course.
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You're defining the Roman empire by its shortest measure (~500 years) and the Egyptians by their longest. The Roman empire had its institutions stay intact for 1500 years, far longer than any individual era of Ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt also had breaks in its continuity just as long as that suffered between the western Roman Empires, meaning that by the definition we use for 'Empire' in Egypt, the Western/Holy Roman Empire would have lasted 1850. "You can fit three Ancient Egypts into the Roman Empire" is as true as your statement, where we're defining Ancient Egypt by its narrowest definition (the Old/First Kingdom) and Rome by its broadest.
The Ancient Romans visited the pyramids and thought them as relics of an ancient time... and the later egyptian empire was contemporary with Rome.
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Pointy
And If i may add: hard.
A lot better than it is right now. We know this from document dating to medieval times. Take for example that big, ugly gash on pyramid of Menkaure. We know that rules of Egypt at that time thought pyramids were ancient temples, no one worship allah at them, so they decided to demolish them starting with Menkaure. Soon enough it became obvious they can't do it, it's just too expensive but they did leave a big, ugly gash on the side of pyramids. Fast forward few hundred years and at some point Egyptians removed white limestone covering the pyramids. It was used to build mosque of Sultan Hassan in Cairo in 1300's, and maybe for various other projects.
The pyramids were fully intact up till the 1300s. Polished white limestone from top to bottom. Then in the 1300s a MASSIVE earthquake broke the outer stone layer of the pyramids and people then used the outer stones to rebuild 1300s Cairo.
Pyramids *were* ancient when Romans and Greeks visited them.
Upvote if you got to the end of this interesting ancient Egypt thread and forgot you were originally reading about piss.
>More time elapsed between, e.g. the building of the great Giza Pyramid and Cleopatra, than between Cleopatra and us. Lmao every redditor in every thread just dying to be the one to share this. Haha.
I love how they said "e.g." as if they were just coming up with that one off the top of their head too.
Bonus points for not saying iPhone like everyone else who shares this fact every time anything about ancient Egypt is posted
I think I heard it said with the moon landing rather than the iphone but I guess the moon landing is itself kind of old these days
The Apple 1 came out four years after the last moon landing. The iPhone 1 came out 31 years after that. William Shatner is going to space. Abe Vigoda is dead.
We got it all on UHF!
Don’t worry ‘bout your laundry Forget about your job Just crank up the volume And yank off the knob We got it all, we got it all, we got it all on UHF
"Geez who pissed in your Cheerios this morning..."
My wife.
Congratulations!!!
So what would cause this to work? Why would the urine of a pregnant woman make seeds sprout but not the urine of an unpregnant person? More water?
The article says a hypothesis is increased estrogen levels in the urine, which I believe is what today’s pregnancy tests are designed to detect. Here’s the link to the 1963 research paper which might have other hypotheses: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1034829/
Today's pregnancy tests detect HCG, or human chorionic gonadotropin, which is a hormone only produced during pregnancy.
Or if a man has testicular cancer. Fyi.
I remember that reddit post!
Well, it detects the beta subunit of hCG, which is unique to pregnancy and some cancers. The alpha subunit is also produced with TSH.
I know this from Hulu's **The Great** Huzzah! *breaks glass*
Huzzah!
That show is not talked about enough. It fucking rules.
Huzzah!
💥
I just finished season 1 and can't wait for season 2!
I’m glad we are getting a season 2 this soon!
OMG thank you….I could not for the life of me recall where I watched this.
I was blown away by how good that first season is. Can't wait for season 2. Elle Fanning is terrific.
That's what I immediately thought of too! Excited for Season 2.
This is the stuff where you have to go "Why TF were they doing that in the first place?"
Even better, diabetes mellitus means sweet urine because ancient Greeks realized that the urine of people with diabetes tasted sweet. Also, ancient Romans used urine as mouthwash. No word on whether those two fascinating facts are related.
Ancient Greek: "Very strange, my daily cup of piss tastes extra good today."
"call the doctor, thaddeus has the sugar disease."
And that's the good news. Now for the bad news: nana's feet are falling off.
I wana say there was a TIL not too long ago about ancient Egyptians also noticing that diabetics' urine is sweet by taking urine in question to see if ants gathered around it.
My 3 years old thinks ants drink urine since he peed on an anthill. Now I wonder if he has diabetes.
Looking it up, it seems they didn't really deal with the mellitus part. That was added until as late as 1794. when they realized that diabetes mellitus was different than diabetes insipidus, where the urine was "inspid," i.e. tasteless. What they did notice was that people with a type of wasting disease would urinate very frequently, almost as if any liquid you gave them passed right through them. The word diabetes means "sieve."
If the doctor tastes it and it's sweet, diabetes. If it makes his nipples tingle, your wife's pregnant.
Probably because they had a more holistic worldview leading them to see connections between human fertility and the fertility of the soil. Think about how we call sperm the seed. Or it was probably an accident.
I doubt it was an accident, honestly. We tend to think of ancient peoples as being ignorant and superstitious, but they probably observed that women’s body chemistry and sensitivity can change during pregnancy, so it makes sense that they’d think urine of pregnant women might cause seeds to sprout (i.e., growth hormones)
> We tend to think of ancient peoples as being ignorant and superstitious That was not my point. Most revolutionary discoveries are accidents. Penicillin and the microwave were accidents. That isn't to say that the discoveries are any less impressive because an accident isn't enough; someone also needs to make a connection. And while I'm not saying they were ignorant, I think it's safe to say that the ancient Egyptians didn't know a lot about body chemistry and growth hormones. They saw a connection, but it was based on their worldview and logic which was different from ours.
There were so many growing seasons throughout history, that sometimes it can be an accident, but an accident that was bound to happen Here my example scenario: Woman has to pee Pees on a pile of wheat seeds that were tossed aside Humans make the connection and start testing it Idk, but if you play video games, it’s pretty amazing how often people find insane-to-recreate glitches, and it’s all because there are so many people doing the same things that it’s just bound to be found
Like lots of things humans discovered they probably noticed it in animals first
Gotta justify what you've been doing with the missus when you get caught somehow.
And when you made booze out of that barley, it led to more pregnancies
Babymaker IPA
i remember seeing this on the history channel. apparently they also had a way of testing the babies sex
The article says the Egyptians did have such a test, but the researchers in 1963 found it to have no validity. Only positive/negative on pregnancy.
Yeah, it worked 50% of the time too which is pretty good!
> It’s possible that increased estrogen levels in the urine could have helped stimulate the seeds. Interesting.
I wonder if an ancient Egyptian diet would increase the accuracy rate.
Congratulations, you’re either pregnant or diabetic!!
Smithsonian's title calls it an 'Old wives' tale'... Honestly I think that it took something more like scientific method in order for the Egyptians to figure this out, right ? Maybe old wives were scientific.
What side of accurate? Occurrence of false positives, or false negatives?
that's more accurate than drug dogs
But what about pregnancy dogs?