I have always chuckled at the mental image of cave men scooting their butts across grass the way dogs will do on carpet.
Probably not the way it was done…
But I think the comparison to dogs is a good illustration that a species doesn’t need to wait for culture or taboos to have a reason to wipe their butt. I’d be shocked if any tool-using human wouldn’t have figured out something.
In addition to the ideas of grass or hides, I think rocks have to be high on the list of candidates. Even today, people in Afghanistan use smooth river rocks in place of toilet paper.
well I know there have been coprolites found preserved in caves. I presume if they survived, the wiping implement might have and that hasn’t been found.
I recognize this requires some BIG ASSumptions; But the lack of leaves found with the piles of preserved poop would indicate to me that they did not wipe in those cases.
My cat wipes his ass on the carpet (much to my chagrin) when shit gets stuck in his fur. We’ve probably done the same since we were furry little apes. As for cleaning up every time? Bipedalism and the development of clothes seem like pretty good answers.
I was serious and figured the wiki comments about ancient Japan and the Romans met your criteria of before “triple-ply aloe-vera pre-cut toilet paper”…
Not that either culture achieved that level of civilization at the same time, so I think the answer you seek will vary by culture.
It became a necessity when all that gluteus maximus muscle meant that the orfice was more recessed, less self-cleaning and more likely to smear. Once we started to walk upright. After all, supposedly that upright stance coincided with our ancestors learning to hunt - being a walking scent-stick probably does not make hunting easy.
I’ve worked with a lot of very down to earth country boys from Mexico over the years and they all used a smooth rock or a hand (not a friend’s hand, I’d guess). My old friend Bufalo went off to take a country crap one day and he came back with a dead cottontail. He told me he was crouching in the brush, saw the rabbit, and winged it with the rock he was going to wipe with. Bet that’s been going on since the monkeys saw the monolith.
one of the reasons for the domestication of dogs was anal hygiene. when dogs started getting fed better then people had to resort to plant leaves and corn cobs. these unsatisfactory methods eventually lead to the invention of the printing press.
A Brit friend of mine told me of a legend (most likely urban), that some would use the neck of a swan to wipe their ass.
He told us this after he told us he believes its illegal to eat swan, except for the Queen. Of course I wondered, in which order she would have her way with the swan.
Yes, there is. Feces – even one’s own, have been shown to be an irritant and create sores. There’s a paper about this, vited in the amazing book End Product – The First Taboo by Dan Sabbath.
If true, this suggests that humans who wiped were less likely to get sick and more likely to survive.
A definitive answer about when this developed probably isn’t going to appear. Wiping materials (see the Rabelais quote, but humans have, based on other sources, used leaves, shells, rocks, paper, and (in ancient Greece and Rome) sponges for this purpose). Most of those are notoriously short-lived, and even with long-lived items like rocks and shells, I doubt if you’re going to find human coprolite remains.
For the record, bipedalism seems to date back to the Australopithecines cira 4 million years ago. I suspect that’s when it all started.
Lack of fur and wearing clothing/less exposure to air. (Occured contemporaneously to a large degree.) Fur keeps the stool off the sensitive skin and lack of clothing, hence exposure to air, let it dry and just rub, fall off along the way. No fur meant sticking to skin and clothing required to stay warm without fur limited air drying and just falling off with contact with ground from sitting, etc. Instead it would get on the clothing … a very valuable item and not something you wanted to have to wash every day.
Changes in diet later on, from Paleolithic to Neolithic, the rise of agriculture, probably changed the nature of the poops.
More crowded and static living conditions. Living in a village required keeping waste separate from food and other common area else diseases would spread. Walking around with poop on your butt spreading on everywhere else you sit, including where you eat will quickly spread infectious diseases. A strong selection pressure would favor any tribe that developed a means of keeping poop from being spread about other areas like that.
Thus I would suggest that minimally some wiping would have originated no later than with the onset of fixed homestead settlement locations (early agricultural times) and probably even along with the loss of fur and wearing of early clothing.
So you clean-with-rock observers, there’s a Wiki entry that must be corrected.
So what the hell does that set of letters mean? (I can’t think of the word. It’s not an acronym, it’s not an abbreviation, its a…Damn, I was really obnoxious a few years ago in a post about using the correct word.)