Ancient Egyptian women used a surprisingly accurate pregnancy test over three thousand years ago that involved urinating on bags of wheat and barley to see if the seeds would sprout.

A closer look

Ancient Egyptian women used a surprisingly accurate pregnancy test over three thousand years ago that involved urinating on bags of wheat and barley to see if the seeds would sprout. According to surviving papyrus medical texts, if the barley grew, it meant the woman was having a boy, and if the wheat grew, she was having a girl, while no growth meant she wasn't pregnant at all. Modern scientists actually tested this ancient method in 1963 and discovered that the elevated estrogen levels in a pregnant woman's urine actually promoted seed germination, making the test seventy percent accurate for detecting pregnancy. While the gender prediction part was complete superstitious nonsense, the basic scientific principle was flawlessly executed millennia before modern chemical testing existed. It is incredibly humbling to realize that thousands of years ago, people were accurately predicting childbirth by peeing on a pile of grain while modern society still struggles to get the office printer to work