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Ancient Egyptian pregnancy test survived millenia because it worked (2018)
- Herodotus38 7y agoA similar method, that is detecting hCG in urine, was used in the early 20th century by injecting into xenopus frog. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2211252/pdf/brmedj04228-0010.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2211252/pdf/brm... Another recent article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/doctors-used-to-use-live-african-frogs-as-pregnancy-tests-64279275/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/doctors-used-to-us...
- syntaxing 7y agoI always like to think about the first person who thought of this. "Hmm let's pee on some wheat and barley, I wonder if this will prove if the woman is pregnant".
- watwut 7y agoSome woman peed on wheat/barley while working outside, it sprouted. She noticed and later found out she is pregnant. Theory formed, gossip did rest to let others know too.
- RandallBrown 7y agoIt's probably something more like the wheat and barley was waste and they peed in the same area they dumped their waste. One family noticed their barley was sprouting, while another's didn't. Shortly after, the family with the sprouts had a baby. It could have taken generations for this to be actually used as a pregnancy test.
- ardy42 7y agoIt's also possible that there was some theory behind it that was wrong but happened to lead to an accurate technique.
- nerdponx 7y agoI was going to suggest this. The Romans for example took a lot of medical interest in urine.
- TheCondor 7y agoIt's still a remarkable observation. Presumably urination was a private thing then as it is now. It seems like a coin toss between some 'shaman' suggesting it and it turned out to be true vs the many observations that had to happen. Women generally have a good idea, perhaps some women started to observe it as they maybe didn't want more children and didn't want men to know about it and we worried about each and every possible indication that could reveal it.
- roel_v 7y agoUrination isn't really private in most of the world outside the West.
- dboreham 7y agoOr Claire from Outlander told them.
- JauntTrooper 7y agoIt may also have been observed in livestock.
- hutzlibu 7y agoIt was a different time, with magic thinking. Urine was (and is) considered to be strong magically tied to the person, so it was on focus for shamans and priests since ages. And used in combination with many other materials, to heal, to foresee, to curse .. And given, that urine does contain many personal informations, there is truth to it ..
- emmelaich 7y agoThere's also the strong link between fertility and spring.
- carapace 7y agoKind of a tangent (but potentially useful and little known) is the "baker's method" of male contraception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marthe_Voegeli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marthe_Voegeli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat-based_contraception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat-based_contraception > It has long been observed that men who work in professions that expose them to heat in the nether regions: bakers, cooks, steamworkers; have had a hard time fathering children. Interestingly, men in these professions were observed to start having children after retiring or finding a new job. Based on these observations, Dr. Martha Vogeli [sic, her name ends with 'e': Marthe] ran a long set of experiments starting in the 1940’s in India. After trying all possible combinations, Dr. Vogeli found a consistent method for inducing temporary infertility in men by a series of hot baths. In short, men who sat in hot water for 45 minutes a day for 3 weeks were protected for at least 6 months. ~ https://www.dontcookyourballs.com/heat-based-contraception-natural-birth-control-for-men/ https://www.dontcookyourballs.com/heat-based-contraception-n...
- qppo 7y agothat's one hell of a domain name
- freeone3000 7y agoHonestly this seems a damn sight safer than most forms of female birth control. Maybe I should register "cookyourballs".
- nickpinkston 7y agoI wonder if the jacuzzi people love or hate this.
- gboss 7y agoI imagine love
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
- zwieback 7y ago70% is 20% better than random, don't buy that crib yet.
- dredmorbius 7y agoMight invest in a bushel basket.
- nostrademons 7y agoWould need to know how the sample was chosen for that test. If you sample women of reproductive age at random, there's decidedly not a 50/50 chance that she's actually pregnant: by rough estimation it should be about (1.75 [fertility rate] * 9 months [duration of pregnancy] / 30 years [reproductive lifespan] = 4-5%). If you give all of those woman a wheat/barley test and 70% of the positive tests were truly pregnant (implying about 6.25% test positives) that's actually pretty good, roughly 8x better than a coin flip. If you take a sample that's known to be half pregnant and half not pregnant and only 70% of the pregnant women are identified, it's decidedly less good.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 7y agoDepends on the true distribution of the classes. Although the naive strategy gets even higher accuracy if the classes are unbalanced.
- Drdrdrq 7y agoSo, 100% is 50% better than random? Weird math.
- YokoZar 7y agoSure it's better than flipping a coin, but how does it compare with just making an educated guess? For some demographics you might get a 70% success rate with something as stupid as "Have you been trying to get pregnant for a few months? If so assume you are."
- teilo 7y ago> 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 That's because almost nothing was lost when the library at Alexandria burned. Because there was almost nothing there to burn at the time. The library had long been in decline by this time period, and there were many other great centers of learning in the world which had extensive libraries. Why does this myth still persist?
- throwaway_pdp09 7y agoProbably because I've never heard anyone contradict it until just now. If you have some reliable references, I'd be happy to learn from them!
- wl 7y agohttps://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/pluginfile.php/437863/mod_resource/content/1/Bagnall%20article.pdf https://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/pluginfile.php/437863/mod...
- throwaway_pdp09 7y agoThat's not great. A quick skim says that the number of books were probably (edit typo: overestimated) by a fair bit: "The actual numbers were probably lower, perhaps by as much as one order of magnitude" Reference to this says "a library that was a tenth of this size [sc. the 500,000 in Ps.-Aristeas] would still have been very large in antiquity") so it was a large library. I have to say, claims of hundreds of thousand weren't really plausible anyway. Second it doesn't say it was dwarfed elsewhere at the time. It does say "The Library of Alexandria, however comprehensive for its time, was not on a scale comparable with the great research libraries of the twentieth century[0]". Which is fair, but doesn't support what you say. finally it doesn't say (that I can see) that it was empty when destroyed. The guy does say there's now way it would have survived a long time due to the humidity and climate it was in, but doesn't suggest (AFAIKS) that it was nearly empty when it was destroyed. [0] well duh So I'm going to go with the more common view for now. Thanks anyway.
- aazaa 7y agoThere's more about this in an Atlantic article: > One of the oldest descriptions of a pregnancy test comes from ancient Egypt, where women who suspected they were pregnant would urinate on wheat and barley seeds: If the wheat grew, they believed, it meant the woman was having a girl; the barley, a boy; if neither plant sprouted, she wasn’t pregnant at all. Avicenna, a 10th-century Persian philosopher, would pour sulfur over women’s urine, believing that the telltale sign was worms springing from the resulting mixture. In 16th-century Europe, specialists known as “piss prophets” would read urine like tea leaves, claiming to know by its appearance alone whether the woman who supplied it was pregnant. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/06/history-home-pregnancy-test/396077/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/06/history-h...
- gus_massa 7y agoIs there a link to the study where they got the 70%? If they used a group with a 50% of pregnant women then 70% is not too much. Also it would be nice to know the number of women to estimate the error in the 70%. *If they had 10 women in total and they get the right result in 7, it is not impressive at all.) Also, the weeks of pregnancy are important. This test is useful proably in before the week 6, but I think the homones level change with time.
- credit_guy 7y agoI'm trying to picture a bunch of archaeologists deciphering some Egyptian papyri, and then going to some hospital (or maybe university) to enlist women who would be willing to pee in some bags with wheat and barley. In order to assess the accuracy of an ancient wives' tale.
- lurquer 7y agoAmbient temperature is important. Seeds are more likely to sprout at certain temps, and women are more likely to conceive in certain seasons (spring, for instance... not due to biology, but rather due to cultural/farming/religious cycles.)
- gwern 7y agoThe paper in question: "ON AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN METHOD OF DIAGNOSING PREGNANCY AND DETERMINING FOETAL SEX", Ghalioungui et al 1963 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1034829/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1034829/ I'm mostly surprised that they cite two previous experiments by Manger (1933, "Untersuchungen zum Problem der Geschlects diagnose aus Schwangerenhamn" https://www.gwern.net/docs/biology/1933-manger.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/biology/1933-manger.pdf ) and Hoffmann (1934, "Versuche zur Schwangerschaftsdiagnose aus dem Harn" https://www.gwern.net/docs/biology/1934-hoffmann.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/biology/1934-hoffmann.pdf ). Who knew? Truly an example of Cowen's second law.
- gus_massa 7y agoThe main results of the experiment in the first paper is: They used 48 samples * 2 male -> no grow * 6 non-pregnant females -> no grow * 40 pregnant females -> 12 no grow | 5 poor grow | 23 grow Mi guess is that in the press article they calculate 28/40 = 70%.
- akie 7y agoSo no false positives? That’s probably why they kept on using it - if it grows, you can be sure that you’re pregnant.
- londons_explore 7y agoI can imagine it might be easy to optimize this test a bit... By repeating the test every few days, and looking at the patterns of grow/no-grow you would probably get a much better result.
- gus_massa 7y agoWith only 6 (8?) cases, the naive bound of the false positives is ~15% and if there is some statistician nearby the bound will be much higher. (I guess close to ~25%, but I'm too lazy to look up the correct calculation.)
- jdtang13 7y agoNot a fan of the patronizing tone the author uses to describe ancient Egypt. Reeks of chronological snobbery.
- dpoochieni 7y agoLol, go out and take a walk, we live in pretty good times compared to the rest of history (and civilizations btw). Is it wrong now wrongthink to think that we have it better or at least we've had some material and slight social progress since that era?
- thimkerbell 7y agoIf I order a bag of whole grain to use for food, is there a way to determine that it has not suffered such indignities? (besides reliance on the plastics industry)
- CGamesPlay 7y agoIt almost certainly has been pooped on by insects and birds.
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y agoHmmm. From plant to combine/harvester, to wagon, to bin, to truck, to elevator, to railcar/barge, to mill, to bag should be an approximate path. I'd say that someone peeing on the bag is most likely to be a problem and you'd notice that. In all other cases, a single person peeing on a couple tons of grain isn't very likely to matter. The ground up dead rats probably affect it more. IOW, there are bigger things to worry about.
- pachico 7y agoIsn't 70% accuracy too close to random (50) to say it works?
- freefrancisco 7y agoWe should back up Wikipedia in stone tablets and bury them in various places on earth and on the dark side of the moon, just in case our Library of Alexandria gets burned by an EMP during a nuclear war.
- prox 7y agohttp://longnow.org/ http://longnow.org/ This organization is dedicated to that endeavor.