厕所如何改变历史 How The Toilet Changed History

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The average person gets rid of approximately 130 grams of poop every day. Maybe twice that much if they've had Taco Bell.

Seven and a half billion of us on Earth? That's a literal mountain of human poop every day.

Yet most of us get to pretend it doesn't exist, all thanks to an invention that has improved health and quality of life more than any other in humanity's history. Bears do it in the woods, whales do it in the ocean, and 2.4 billion of us DON'T do it in a toilet.

Dysentery, typhoid, parasites, and other infections lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths every year, all because one in three people alive in 2017 don't have access to toilets and latrines. From on top of our porcelain thrones, we've left a lot of our species drowning in feces.

Nearly a billion people still defecate out in the open: in street gutters, open water, orin the woods. Thousands of years ago, we all did it that way, but as we developed agriculture and settled into towns, poop started piling up.

Around five thousand years ago, Neolithic villagers constructed the first known toilets at Skara Brae. At the same time, many houses in Mohenjo Daro, featured toilets complete with drains, people washed their poop into sewers that emptied into the Indus River.

It's still be thousands of years before we linked germs to disease, but avoiding filth has deep evolutionary roots. Bodily excretions, death, and rotten smells can be signs of danger or disease, triggering our innate sense of disgust.

This biological instinct ended up in the moral codes of many religions, like this passage from the Old Testament instructing the Hebrews to do their Exodus in aholy fashion. Roman society was pretty comfortable with Caca.

At one point, Rome had 144 public toiletslong open benches that emptied into the Cloaca Maxima, a sewer system that carried waste to the Tiber river. But the vast majority of Romans simply pooped in a pot and threw it into the street.

As waste and disease piled up, Romans pointed to the stink as the cause of sickness. After the Roman Empire faded away, this connection between bad air and bad health persisted, clogging up toilet innovation for more than a thousand years.

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