I like that the part of the story that happens current-day and is easily checked is the part that starts with "It is said".
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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Tested by The West™ of all places.
Why would a [cigarette company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_(cigarette)) test such thing?
Boys are more likely to smoke so they want to make sure they are marketing to the correct pregnancies
I think they meant Adam West.
Sounds like a slow and inaccurate pregnancy test more then anything else, and apparently it even works. Kinda impressive that they managed to figure it out, I guess thousands of years of fucking around paid off.
I think something like this was used but only as a pregnancy test. Where do people get these extra wild ideas from?
This is real and the Egyptians did use the wheat and barley method for pregnancy testing. Surprisingly it's not complete hokum because it did work for detecting pregnancy 70-85% of the time if not the specific gender
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/pee-pregnant-history-science-urine-based-pregnancy-tests/
It definitely did not tell anyone the gender. It's been tested and it can, as you said, detect pregnancy more than random chance but not perfectly. It cannot predict the gender.
I was really into ancient Egypt as a kid and read about this growing up. The level of medical knowledge they seemed to have (or at least their willingness to wing it) is very interesting!
When it comes to people figuring out things by chance it's basically the monkeys writing Shakespeare gag, get enough of us in the same place just trying shit out eventually we get something right
I don’t know, but if they didn’t get them, we wouldn’t have this community to enjoy their crazy.
A lot of cultures have a lot of weird superstitions and myths related to childbirth.
I had a Nepalese friend who once told me that if you conceive on a weekend you would have a girl but if you conceive on a weekday you would have a boy.
I pointed out that it must just be a coincidence then that our species has nearly an equal number of men and women, and he agreed that it was a great coincidence.
I then asked him how often that superstition was correct and how often it got it working, he said about 50/50.
Peeing is the same thing as pinging?
That's my effort to make this logical. It hurt.
I am reminded of that scene in Hunt For Red October where Sean Connery turns to his sonarman and says "Give me a pee, Vasili. One pee only."
Not insane. This is true. Iirc, there's some hormonal changes in the urine that causes the wheat/barley to grow first, depending on the sex of the fetus.
The accuracy of this method is overexaggerated, though. Iirc, when tested, it was found to be something like 75% accurate. For what it's worth, that's pretty accurate for the ancient world
You can think the concept of ancient Egyptian sonar isn't insane if you like, but the Egyptians didn't have sonar because it was developed in 1915 and you don't use sonar to look at a baby in the womb, you use ultrasound. Sonar uses sound within the range of human hearing.
Also, it isn't true.
So is there any science behind the ancient test? According to the National Institutes of Health, in 1963 researchers decided to try out the method. In a study published in the journal Medical History they found that wheat and barley watered with urine from men and non-pregnant women kept the grains from sprouting. But in about 70 percent of the cases, the urine from pregnant women did cause the grain to sprout. The test, however, did not accurately predict the sex of the children. It’s possible that increased estrogen levels in the urine could have helped stimulate the seeds.
Seems totally reasonable
/s