What Did Ancient Humans Use For Toilet Paper?

What did people use instead of toilet paper? Seashells, tapestries, wooden sticks and more.

Transcript

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