Potty Habits of the Ancients

To those of you who have had a ridicuous amount of snow this year, 50 degrees F. probably sounds good enough to put on a bathing suit and yell for a shirtless hula boy to bring you a drink with a paper umbrella in it. But you'd be surprised how damn cold 50 degrees F. is when your jeans are down around your ankles.

Our employer does not believe in heating the ladies' room. We are not enriching the shareholders while we are having a bathroom break, so we cannot enjoy heat during the interlude. I guess they figure it will get us out of there sooner. It works. We avoid the detested trip and wait for the earth to warm naturally as the sun climbs higher in the sky, thus improving conditions in the ladies' room.

My heart goes out to the ancient Native Americans, the Vikings, Druids, and other ancient people who probably did not enjoy heated facilities. Imagine waking up at 3:00 a.m. on a January night in 200 B.C and it's 2 degrees F., snowing big time, and there are wild animals roaming around. Even much more recently, how did the early settlers manage it? The little room with the little half-moon on the door was not heated at any time of the day. How did they manage?

The ancient Romans had public toilets with running water. I saw that on the Discovery channel, or maybe it was National Geographic or the History channel.

The ancient Japanese had some sort of sophisticated setup also. Shogun, the book. The miniseries glossed over that. Anyway, I think it was outside and it gets pretty cold over there. The ladies' room and mens' room was one and the same, kind of like the youth hostels in Holland. One sure-fire recipe for constipation.

The Essenes, who lived about the time that BC changed to AD, had their toilet rituals perscribed for them and written down. There was no mention of any facilities, just something about using a stick to dig a hole in the ground, and digging holes before the sabbath so they'd be ready and not require digging on the Sabbath. That's from Flavius Josephus, ancient Jewish historian. He was blogging without a computer at about that time.

So our situation in the ladies room is not much better than theirs, weather-wise. But whatever possessed the folks in Africa 100,000 years ago to leave that nice warm weather and go to Europe before the onset of heated restrooms is beyond me.