Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, we have a lot more in common
Speaker 1: with ancient people than we might think. For instance, it
Speaker 1: was as useful for a woman to know three thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred years ago whether she was pregnant or not
Speaker 1: as it is today. And though some may scoff at
Speaker 1: many of the practices the ancients considered science, in ancient Egypt,
Speaker 1: astrology was cutting edge technology. You've got to hand it
Speaker 1: to them. Some of their scientific methods have turned out
Speaker 1: to be pretty accurate. According to some unpublished ancient Egyptian
Speaker 1: medical texts in the Papyrus Carlsberg collection at the University
Speaker 1: of Copenhagen in Denmark, what they had in the way
Speaker 1: of pregnancy tests was grain, specifically barley and wheat, but
Speaker 1: it worked. According to one papyrus text from around one thousand,
Speaker 1: four hundred b C. In order for a woman to
Speaker 1: determine whether she was pregnant or not, all she had
Speaker 1: to do was urinate in two different bags, one filled
Speaker 1: with barley and the other with wheat. If the grain
Speaker 1: in either bag subsequently sprouted, the woman was definitely with
Speaker 1: child and could start planning accordingly. But wait, there's more.
Speaker 1: In order to tell the sex of the child, the
Speaker 1: woman simply had to wait and see which of the
Speaker 1: grains sprouted first. If the barley sprouted faster, the baby
Speaker 1: would be a boy. If the wheat sprouted first, it
Speaker 1: would be a girl. According to the National Institute of Health,
Speaker 1: a study conducted in nineteen sixty three found that this
Speaker 1: method of determining pregnancy is accurate about seventy percent of
Speaker 1: the time, which isn't bad, although it was not accurate
Speaker 1: at all when it came to determining the sex of
Speaker 1: the baby. Modern pregnancy tests rely on proteins that can
Speaker 1: detect a hormone called human choreonic ganatotropin or hCG, but
Speaker 1: scientists speculate that this old timey test worked so well
Speaker 1: because elevated levels of estrogen in a woman's urine might
Speaker 1: have promoted seed growth. It's estimated that as few as
Speaker 1: zero point zero one percent of ancient Egyptian medical text survive,
Speaker 1: but researchers currently pouring over the papyri in the Carlsberg
Speaker 1: collection are finding that medical information discovered in ancient Egypt
Speaker 1: didn't disappear when the Library of Alexandria burned. By that time,
Speaker 1: it had made its way all over the African continent
Speaker 1: and beyond. Sophie Shoots, a PhD student from the University
Speaker 1: of Copenhagen, told Science Nordic, many of the ideas in
Speaker 1: the medical texts from ancient Egypt appear again in later
Speaker 1: Greek and Roman texts. From here they spread further to
Speaker 1: the medieval medical texts in the Middle East, and you
Speaker 1: can find traces all the way up to pre modern medicine,
Speaker 1: which goes to show that first of all, people have
Speaker 1: always needed useful reproductive health advice, and second of all,
Speaker 1: necessity has always been the mother of invention. Today's episode
Speaker 1: was written by Jesselyin Shields and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: I'm supposed to remind you to contain yourself in brain
Speaker 1: stuff themed t shirts from our online shop at t
Speaker 1: public dot com slash brain Stuff, and of course from
Speaker 1: more on this and lots of other inventive topics, visit
Speaker 1: our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com. M