What did people use instead of toilet paper? Seashells, tapestries, wooden sticks and more.
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00What did ancient humans use to wipe after going to the bathroom?
00:06Throughout history, people have used everything from their own hands to corn cobs to snow
00:11to clean up after bowel movements.
00:14Most of the material we don't have because it's organic or just disappeared,
00:18according to Susan Morrison, a medieval literature professor at Texas State University.
00:23However, experts have been able to recover some samples.
00:27Some even had traces of feces and depictions of toilet paper's precursors in art and literature.
00:34One of the oldest materials on record for this purpose were wooden or bamboo sticks
00:39wrapped in cloth called hygiene sticks, dating back to 2,000 years ago in China.
00:44From 332 B.C. to 642 A.D. during the Greco-Roman period,
00:50another stick was used called a tesorium,
00:53which had a sea sponge on the end and was left in public bathrooms for communal use.
00:58However, it's also possible that these weren't used to clean people's beehives, but the bathrooms themselves.
01:04Either way, tesoriums were cleaned by dumping them in a bucket of salt or vinegar water.
01:10Greeks and Romans also wiped with flat, disc-shaped ceramics called posoi.
01:16Archaeologists have found these relics with traces of feces on them,
01:20as well as an ancient wine cup featuring a man wiping his bum with posoi.
01:25The abrasive characteristics of ceramics suggest that long-term use of posoi
01:30could have resulted in local irritation, skin, or mucosal damage,
01:34or complications of external hemorrhoids, according to the British Medical Journal.
01:40In the 8th century A.D., the Japanese used another type of wooden stick called chugi
01:45to clean both the outside and inside of the anus,
01:48likely putting a stick up there.
01:52In the Middle Ages, people also used moss, sedge, hay, straw, and pieces of tapestry.
01:58Granted, nowadays not everyone uses tola paper.
02:02Water, such as a gentle stream from a bidet, keeps many people's undersides clean the world over.
02:18www.cst.eu.com