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? Throughout

00:06history people have used everything from their own hands to corn cobs to snow to

00:11clean up after bowel movements. Most of the material we don't have because it's

00:17organic or just disappeared according to Susan Morrison a medieval literature

00:21professor at Texas State University. However experts have been able to

00:25recover some samples. Some even had traces of feces and depictions of toilet

00:31paper's precursors in art and literature. One of the oldest materials on record for

00:36this purpose were wooden or bamboo sticks wrapped in cloth called hygiene sticks

00:41dating back to 2,000 years ago in China. From 332 BC to 642 AD during the

00:49Greco-Roman period another stick was used called a tesorium which had a sea

00:54sponge on the end and was left in public bathrooms for communal use. However it's

00:59also possible that these weren't used to clean people's behinds but the bathrooms

01:02themselves. Either way tesoriums were cleaned by dumping them in a bucket of

01:07salt or vinegar water. Greeks and Romans also wiped with flat disc-shaped ceramics

01:14called pissoi. Archaeologists have found these relics with traces of feces on them

01:19as well as an ancient wine cup featuring a man wiping his bum with pissoi. The

01:25abrasive characteristics of ceramics suggest that long-term use of pissoi

01:29could have resulted in local irritation, skin or mucosal damage or complications

01:35of external hemorrhoids according to the British Medical Journal. In the 8th

01:40century AD the Japanese used another type of wooden stick called chugi to clean

01:45both the outside and inside of the anus likely putting a stick up there. In the

01:52Middle Ages people also used moss, sedge, hay, straw and pieces of tapestry. Granted

01:59nowadays not everyone uses toilet paper. Water such as a gentle stream from a bidet

02:04keeps many people's undersides clean the world over.