Hahaha, I had no clue about the shells. You piqued my interest, so I went down the toilet paper history rabbit hole.

I knew that the Romans used communal sponges, I didn’t know they were called tersorium though. Shockingly they spread disease.

Apparently here in the north, the vikings used animal bones, rags, and oyster shells! I’m not surprised we didn’t use paper though, since we didn’t really get paper until the Christians came and brought paper with them, and even then it was only for the educated Christian elite for hundreds of years, up until around the 1200-1300 or so, a good 700 years after people in China wiped their butts with paper!

Toilet paper started being produced here in Sweden in 1882, and the first factory stayed producing until sometime in the early 2000s.

Until the 1900s common folk often used leaves, grass, or the bottom hem of their skirt to clean themselves.

That last bit sounds really gross by modern standards, but given that skirts came in layers, and were really long, they were already covered with the muck of the outside ground so in the grand scheme of things I don’t think it made a very big difference.

According to the manufacturer, the first toilet paper (in Sweden) without wood chips and splinters was released in 1935.

My bidet butt could never handle scraping with oysters or splinterful toilet paper; I’d just scrape my anus off. I can barely use regular toilet paper as it is. People of old were built different hahahaha.

Some cursory googling for this turned up a value by researcher Alex Crumbie, though I didn’t find any papers about it. According to them however 30% of the world uses toilet paper, the majority consumer being China. The remaining 70% of the world finds other solutions.

Given that Muslims wash as a religious requirement and are 1.8 billion…

Va bene! That’s not so much the case here in Sweden.

It kind of boggles the mind though. Setting aside the fact that paper only can’t possibly clean enough, isn’t it also more environmentally friendly to use water? I mean obviously if you pour a bathtub over your butt every time you do your business, then probably not so much, but no one uses that much water.