
Ancient Egyptian pregnancy test survived millenia because it worked (2018) - vezycash
https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/biology-fields/ancient-egyptian-pregnancy-test-survived-millenia-because-it-worked.htm
======
teilo
> 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
Probably 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!

~~~
ashtonkem
Alexandria also mostly had copies, they were famous for stealing books from
arriving ships in order to make copies for a while there.

~~~
CyreneOfCyrene
Incoming ships got searched for books because there was a law in place made by
one of the Ptolemies that any ships coming in would be required by law to lend
any books on board to the library to make copies. Sometimes, the scribes would
keep the original and give the copy back because they would be hard to
distinguish.

~~~
indigochill
Since we can probably assume the copies of these books were made without the
consent of the original author or publisher, would that make these pirate
ships?

~~~
IIAOPSW
No, but it would make Alexandria the pirate bay.

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gwern
The 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
The 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
So 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
I 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
With 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.)

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carapace
Kind 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-n...](https://www.dontcookyourballs.com/heat-based-
contraception-natural-birth-control-for-men/)

~~~
SaltyBackendGuy
I am wondering if my MBP on my lap was the root cause of my fertility issues.
I can't believe I didn't google this before.

~~~
fortran77
That's why you should use a Linux Laptop with Libreboot firmware and arch
linux and not an emasculating MBP.

~~~
snazz
Or just a plastic-body laptop with the heat vent off to the side.

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Herodotus38
A 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/brm...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2211252/pdf/brmedj04228-0010.pdf)

Another recent article: [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/doctors-
used-to-us...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/doctors-used-to-use-
live-african-frogs-as-pregnancy-tests-64279275/)

------
syntaxing
I 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".

~~~
RandallBrown
It'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
It's also possible that there was some theory behind it that was wrong but
happened to lead to an accurate technique.

~~~
nerdponx
I was going to suggest this. The Romans for example took a lot of medical
interest in urine.

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gus_massa
Is 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
I'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.

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aazaa
There'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-h...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/06/history-
home-pregnancy-test/396077/)

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zwieback
70% is 20% better than random, don't buy that crib yet.

~~~
nostrademons
Would 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.

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freefrancisco
We 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
[http://longnow.org/](http://longnow.org/) This organization is dedicated to
that endeavor.

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thimkerbell
If 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)

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Hmmm.

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.

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lurquer
Ambient 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.)

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pachico
Isn't 70% accuracy too close to random (50) to say it works?

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jdtang13
Not a fan of the patronizing tone the author uses to describe ancient Egypt.
Reeks of chronological snobbery.

~~~
dpoochieni
Lol, 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?

