People who fantasize about traveling back in time to the ancient past often forget that modern rolled toilet paper was invented in 1895, and other paper wasn’t widely used in the west for long before that. Prior to the 1850s, things like corn cobs were commonly used. Ancient China had forms of toilet paper, but most of the rest of the ancient world used everything from sponges on sticks (shared communally) to wooden spatulas, to sea shells to get clean (or not, and die from it).

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https://cleantechnica.com/2021/08/30/a-crappy-cleantech-topic-designing-the-toilet-of-the-future-part-1/