HISTORY OF SHITTING

Think about monkeys. We’re all part of a Monkey Sphere so it’s interesting to look at them. If you had a pet monkey, what would you call him; Slappy? Chaser? Bopper? George? Shit Thrower?

I say Shit Thrower because apart from pulling their knobs about most of the day, monkeys tend to throw a lot of shit. They have a crap, catch it and then chuck it at their mates. If they manage to catch one of their mates in the face, they all crack up. Well, except the geezer who’s now got a fresh turd all over his boat, that is.

We have a fairy sophisticated drainage systems which pipes our waste through a soil stack, which in turn takes the waste through a main drain beneath the house. Those bends in the pipes behind your toilet prevent the odours escaping through the pipes …. Well, to a certain extent anyway. 

But monkeys have none of that. They feel a crap coming on and already they’re chuckling away to themselves. Trying not to draw any attention to himself, he shits a bomb that would block most of our toilets, catches it as it comes out of his arse and …. BOOF! Straight in his mate’s face!! And Matey who’s just relieved himself is in bits! 

And they never tire of this. Its their constant game. Throwing shit at each other.

But we didn’t always have the drainage systems that we have today. Our nomadic ancestors had it easy. They just shat whenever and wherever they felt like it. They had no privacy issues, they didn’t have Neolithic transgender geezers trying to use the ladies’ toilets, and they had no preferences regarding toilet paper. They simply crapped and fucked off, leaving Mother Nature to convert it back to soil. 

Eventually, once Monkey Spheres started to form, the clans would stop in a place for a while, and they may even have noticed that plants tended to grow bigger, better, and yes tastier in places where they shat. Although I can’t imagine the reaction of everyone else in the clan the first time Neolithic Matey said, ‘Fuck me, have you tried eating the roots and leaves in the shitter, they’re fucking great.’ But after a while, like most things (injecting yourself with the seed pods of opium poppy plants for instance), it caught on and whenever they returned to a certain area next year they’d remember where they used to shit and head straight down there to eat whatever had grown.

Just like the fish restaurants in Poole and Bournemouth advertise fish fresh from Poole Harbour or Mudeford Quay, the first Neolithic restaurants probably advertised, ‘Roots Fresh from the Shithouse!’ 

They wouldn’t have known it at the time, but they’d just discovered farming. The problem being, of course, that once they saw the value of shit, they couldn’t walk away from it. They just had to let it pile up. On the plus side, they were no longer throwing it at each other, so already we were ahead of the monkeys, who, let’s face it, haven’t really moved on in the last 12,000 years. They still think it’s a crack to catch their shit and rub their mate’s face in it.

The trouble is it stank, and even Neolithic Man started to get pissed off with it. So, they dug pits and designated certain bushes to shit behind or just had a shit on the riverbank, although I’ve no doubt that pissed off the bloke trying to fish for his supper a couple of miles downriver. 

Anyway, that was the first sewage system. Shit in the river, let some other cunt deal with it.

But populations started to grow, and I think it was the old Cretians or Minoans – they were clever bastards – who worked out your average adult produces about a pound of poo a day, so your average Minoan city would generate something like 50 tons of crap daily (you don’t need to check that, I’ve just made it up). Some of it, of course, would fertilise their vegetable patches. Easy-peasy; go over to their allotment every day and have a shit and all the barley and malt and whatever else they fucking ate would grow like a good ‘un. 

But 50 tons a day is more than your average Minoan allotment can handle. What did they do with the rest of the shit? You can see the problem facing the Minoan civilisation now, can’t you? The only way out of it would be depopulation. But they needed their men because back then there were loads of wars going on. You couldn’t turn around without a new war starting up, and it’d be no good if they killed off all their blokes simply because they shit too much. In fact, that’s probably what most of the wars were about at the time, killing off other blokes to stop them shitting.   

The only other answer was water. Without water they’d be fucked, so this is where the first engineer proved his worth. He worked out a way for humankind to dump its shit into the sea, and that’s the first sewage system. Four thousand years ago, the Palace of Minos in Knossos had a cleaning system in which rainwater from the roof was gathered and used to flush the sewage from their bathrooms. Thy created ceramic pipes, shaping the pipe ends so that the pieces fit tightly into each other, although I’m sure they occasionally clogged up, but there were actually manholes to send a Polish bloke down to clean and maintain them, even if they can’t have had much ventilation.

Next, along came the Romans, and for them, going for a shit was a bit of a social occasion. They met their mates, brought along a few jars of wine mixed with spice, argued about football and politics, and wiped their bottoms with a piece of sea sponge fixed to a short wooden handle. It wasn’t the most hygienic way of wiping your bottom, but it saved on toilet paper.

But the Romans had ten times more inhabitants than Knossos, and thus produced ten times more shit; say 500 tons a day. They needed a truly colossal sewer system. Remember, the old Romans had public baths, and they used the water from these to flush the bogs. The first ever use of ‘grey water’.  The fucking monkeys have never thought of that, have they?

However, these were Men Only toilets. Maybe the odd slave girl from Spain or Greece or North Africa who’d been sent to the market would venture in out of necessity, although she was at risk of being assaulted or raped. The elite Roman woman wouldn’t be caught dead in there. Back at their comfortable villas, the wealthy citizens had their own personal latrines constructed over cesspools, although they didn’t really want to connect their cesspools to the sewer pipes because of the stink, and in case rats ran up them, so they’d crap in chamber pots and get the old slave to empty them into their garden. 

So, the women’s shit ended up in the garden, and the men’s shit was piped out of the city and dumped into the Tiber, polluting the very water the citizens depended on for bathing and drinking. 

In Medieval England, people started used ‘potties’ and simply threw their shit out the window. So, if the housewife suspected her husband was knocking off another woman from the next street over, she’d wait until she came sashaying past and tip the whole family’s shit on top of her head. ‘Sorry,’ she’d say, ‘Nice dress that, never mind.’    

Of course, we don’t do that now. We’re more civilised. Well, at least I hope you’re more civilised. I hope you don’t go for a shit down the pub and chuck it at the barman for calling last orders, maybe you do. But for the most part, things have moved on. Except for the monkeys, that is. They never tire of it. They love chucking shit at each other! They could play football with it if they had any brains, and form shit-kicking teams. But no, not the monkeys. Have a crap and Boof! Straight into their mate's face with it.

Copyright © Karl Wiggins