According to one papyrus text from around 1400 B.C.E., a woman might tell if she was pregnant or not by urinating in two distinct bags – one filled with barley and the other with wheat. If the grain in either bag germinated after being peed on, the woman was undoubtedly pregnant and could begin making plans appropriately.
Can a Urine Test Determine the Gender of a Child
But hold on, there’s more! The mom merely had to wait and observe which of the grains grew first to determine the gender of her new kid. The kid would be a male if the barley sprouted first, and a girl if the wheat sprouted first.
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According to the National Institute of Health, 1963 research discovered that this way of determining pregnancy is accurate approximately 70% of the time – not bad, ancient Egyptians – but it was completely inaccurate when it came to determining the sex of the baby.
Science Behind Pregnancy Tests
Modern pregnancy tests rely on proteins that detect a hormone known as human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), but scientists believe that this old-fashioned test performed so effectively because higher levels of estrogen in a woman’s urine may have stimulated seed growth.
How Pregnancy Testing Improvised
The urine-based pregnancy test has advanced in speed, accuracy, and feasibility since ancient Egypt. Urinating on grain seeds and watching them sprout was the oldest known test. The late 1920s saw the introduction of the first modern pregnancy tests, in which pregnant women’s urine was injected into animals, causing them to ovulate. These tests required mailing urine to a lab and the findings took at least a week to arrive. Beginning in 1960, antibodies enabled pregnancy testing to be performed in doctor’s offices, making pregnancy testing faster and more commonplace. An at-home version of this antibody-based test was available in Canada by 1971, but it did not reach the United States until 1977. In 1988, the first stick tests, comparable to the at-home tests available today, were produced.
Source: Medindia
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