(ORDO NEWS) — Any life is important, and any information is useful. A special kind of worms in the human body proves this. Through their lives, scholars have expanded their knowledge of the toilet habits of the ancient Romans.
After examining a 1500-year-old pot, dug out in the ruins of the Villa Gerache in Sicily, scientists have established its extraordinary nature.
The ancient Romans used such containers for various purposes, but it turned out that they also did not shy away from peeing there. This was found out because of the eggs of the whipworm, a parasite that causes intestinal infections in humans, preserved inside the eggs.
It is assumed that at some point the eggs of the worm came out naturally from the body of an ancient Roman and, by coincidence, were preserved on the walls of the pot.
The preservation of the eggs, according to the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports, was aided by the accumulation of minerals from feces and urine inside the pot, which could have been building up for decades.
An unobvious fact about the ancient Roman inhabitants
For scientists, it was not a surprise that such pots can be used as a toilet. “But so far, there has been no direct evidence that the cone-type pots were unequivocally nocturnal,” says Roger Wilson, director of the British University and one of the co-authors of the study.
The pot, a little over a foot high (about 30 cm), was found near the bath complex of Villa Gerache, where there was no full toilet. This led to the conclusion that the ancient inhabitants of this area of Sicily used the pot rather than the toilet.
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