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Ancient people in India, Europe and some other countries used natural methods to detect pregnancy, including urine tests with seeds, garlic tests, pulse assessments, and bee behaviour.
In ancient India, Ayurvedic medicine relied on the pulse test to detect pregnancy.
Long before the invention of modern pregnancy kits in the 1970s and 1980s, civilisations around the world had already developed methods to detect pregnancy using natural ingredients and traditional beliefs. While today’s pregnancy tests rely on detecting hormones in urine, ancient societies, including those in Egypt, Greece, India, and Europe, devised innovative techniques that often yielded surprisingly accurate results.
Historical records suggest that even 500 years ago – and in some cases over 3,500 years ago – people employed various methods to determine pregnancy. One of the earliest and most documented techniques comes from ancient Egypt around 1500 BC. Egyptian women would pour their urine over sacks of wheat and barley seeds. If the seeds sprouted, it was believed the woman was pregnant.
The method also claimed to predict the baby’s sex: if the wheat germinated first, the baby was thought to be a girl, while the early sprouting of barley indicated a boy. Modern scientific analysis supported the effectiveness of this test, showing that hormones present in the urine of pregnant women can accelerate seed germination, with an estimated accuracy of around 70 percent.
Meanwhile, in ancient Greece, pregnancy detection took a different approach using garlic and onions. The Greek physician Hippocrates proposed that a woman should place a garlic or onion clove inside her vagina before sleeping. If the smell of garlic or onion was detectable on her breath the next morning, it meant the woman was not pregnant. The test was based on the belief that the uterus was open in non-pregnant women, allowing the scent to travel through the body, whereas a closed uterus during pregnancy would trap the smell.
In ancient India, Ayurvedic medicine relied on the pulse test to detect pregnancy. Traditional healers, or vaidyaswould assess changes in a woman’s pulse to determine pregnancy, believing that hormonal shifts in the body would alter the pulse pattern. This method was deeply rooted in Ayurvedic understanding of the body’s internal balance and hormonal changes.
Europe, too, had its own unique pregnancy testing tradition. In some parts of medieval Europe, women’s urine was poured into a closed container, and bees were released into it. If the bees became unusually active, it was taken as a sign of pregnancy. This practice likely stemmed from the belief that hormonal changes in pregnant women’s urine could influence the behaviour of bees.
These ancient techniques reflect humanity’s long-standing curiousity and ingenuity in understanding pregnancy, even in the absence of modern scientific tools.
