How Women Knew They Were Pregnant 3,500 Years Ago
all along: from the very beginning or during the whole time
For most of human history, a woman had no quick and reliable way to know she was pregnant. She had to wait and watch her body. But the ancient Egyptians had a test that actually worked. And nobody at the time understood why.
A 3,500-year-old Egyptian papyrus offered women a clear and simple pregnancy test. Urinate into two cloth bags. Fill one with barley and one with wheat. If the grain sprouted, you were pregnant. If nothing grew, you were not.
It sounds like pure superstition. But in 1963, scientists tested the ancient method. Urine from pregnant women made the grain sprout about 70 percent of the time. Urine from other people did not. The reason is hormones. A pregnant woman’s body makes more estrogen, and estrogen helps seeds grow. The Egyptians could not have known why it worked, but the test was measuring something real all along.
Thousands of years later, 20th century scientists finally understood the hidden ingredient: hormones. And they put it to work in an even stranger test. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the standard pregnancy test in Britain used a live frog. A woman mailed her urine to a lab by Royal Mail. Doctors injected it into a female frog. A pregnant woman’s body makes a hormone called hCG, and within a day that hormone made the frog lay eggs.
In the 1960s, antibody tests replaced the frog. By the late 1970s, a woman could test at home, and those tests still detect hCG, the same hormone the frog once revealed.
Sample sentences
I looked everywhere for my keys, but they were in my pocket all along.
We thought the noise was a problem with the car, but it had been coming from a loose water bottle in the trunk all along.
He told everyone the plan would fail. He was right all along.
Read More
In the 1950s, You Gave Your Urine to a Frog to Find Out If You Were Pregnant (IFLScience)
Egyptian Papyrus Reveals This Old Wives’ Tale Is Very, Very Old Indeed (Smithsonian)
