Sanitation aboard a pirate ship was far from ideal. Bathing was a rarity, and clean clothes were scarce, often stolen from other ships. Hot baths were a luxury reserved for the sick, usually onshore...
By examining ancient poop from Biblical-era toilets in Jerusalem, a new study has revealed that these ancient toilets contain the oldest evidence ever found of a microscopic parasite known to cause...
From the Sumerians and Egyptians to the Victorians and beyond, humans have been striving to keep their surroundings clean since they first settled down and built permanent homes. Before civilization...
Archaeologists have unearthed the bottom half of a manual flush toilet that dates back 2,400 years in the Yueyang archaeological site in China’s Shaanxi province. Yueyang served as a capital city...
People in the past have a reputation for being dirty and unhygienic, but is this true? While many aspects of personal hygiene have evolved over the centuries, others have remained surprisingly...
Can you imagine waking up in a world with no toilet paper? What would you use? Can you imagine what people did before toilet paper became so ubiquitous? Toilet paper is among the most essential...
While today we flush our urine away without giving it a second thought, in ancient times it was considered a valuable commodity. Urine contains a wide array of important minerals and chemicals such...
A medieval toilet may not be the first place you’d want to dig as an archaeologist, but old latrines are surprisingly good at revealing secrets to life in the Middle Ages! A team of scientists...
I have spent an awful lot of time in Roman sewers – enough to earn me the nickname Queen of Latrines from my friends. The Etruscans laid the first underground sewers in the city of Rome around 500 BC...