Dirt is only matter out of place, and is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’. Nature does not care what we think, or how we respond, to matter in all its forms. But as a species we do care, very deeply, about our own survival. A dense mass of human history clusters around the belief that dirt is ‘bad’, and that dirt removal (cleansing) is always ‘good’. The old Anglo-Saxon word ‘clean’ was used in a wide variety of situations: it was often blatantly human-centred or self-serving in a way we might call ‘moral’; but it was also used more objectively as a technical term, to measure or judge material things relative to other things. It was thoroughly comprehensive, and unquestioned.
Preceding all human cultural history, however—certainly before any human history of personal hygiene—were billions of years of wholly amoral species development. The exact date one enters this endless time-line is almost irrelevant; what we are really looking for are the time-spans or periods when things speed up, which in the case of Homo sapiens sapiens was somewhere between c.100,000 and 25,000 BCE, followed by another burst of development after c.5000 BCE. Throughout this long period of animal species development, all of our persistent, overriding, and highly demanding bio-physical needs were evolving and adapting, and providing the basic infrastructure for the later, very human-centred, psychology, technology, and sociology of cleanliness.
It is difficult not to use ancient language when describing the egotistical processes of human physiology—routinely described as the ‘fight’ for life—and in particular, our endless battle against poisonous dirt. Much of this battle is carried out below the level of consciousness. Most of the time our old animal bodies are in a constant state of defence and renewal, but we feel or know nothing about it; and the processes are virtually unstoppable. We can no more stop evacuating than we can stop eating or breathing—stale breath, of course, is also an expulsion of waste matter. Ancient scientists were strongly focused on the detailed technology of these supposedly poisonous bodily ‘evacuations’; and modern science also uses similarly careful technical terminology when describing bodily ‘variation’, ‘elimination’, ‘toxicity’, or ‘waste products’. In either language, old or new, inner (and outer) bodily ‘cleansing’ is ultimately connected to the more profound principle of ‘wholesomeness’ within the general system of homeostasis that balances and sustains all bodily functions.
There can be no disputing the link between cleansing and survival. Survival is the main aim of the organism. External attacks or accidents apart, the most common and constant threats to its survival are internal poisoning, and premature decay. The body defends itself from these vigorously: firstly, through the complex filters and waste-disposal system which make up most of the innards; secondly, by the judicious use of the internal-external sense organs; and thirdly, by manipulating the outer limbs to attend to the external body surfaces. Without this massive tripartite, self-defensive, self-cleansing, physiological system we would quickly die.
‘Biological cleansing’ is a biotechnology of perpetual motion, common to all species. Bio-perpetual motion runs on its own time. As in all other plants and animals our bodies respond obediently to the macrobiological rhythms of our solar and lunar ‘body clocks’, that prompt us through the years, months, days, and hours, ordaining the time to eat, sleep, give birth, grow, or die.1 Human body-cleansing also has its own physical calendars and clocks. Powerful daily circadian cycles regulate our total energy flow and all the major bodily processes, particularly the arrival and passing of the menses, the fetus, and the faeces. Micro-second cellular activity is constant—but it is when we are asleep, or resting, that microbiological ‘cleansing’ can take place relatively uninterrupted. It is no accident that we cleanse ourselves in the morning from the evacuated remnants of our night’s sleep; just as we cleanse ourselves in the evenings from the remnants of the day’s work.
Poison or dirt removal—cleansing—starts in the cell. Modern immunology records the great cellular battles that are fought by the organic ‘Self’ against mutation, malfunction, and the physical invasion of lethal pathogens—cells which bring about the death of whole cells, or whole organisms, before the genetically determined time.2 Not all ‘foreign bodies’ destroy their host cells, but some of them do it rapidly and spectacularly, and the most lethal of these travel the globe, creating epidemics of infectious diseases. Normal healthy cells, on the other hand, reproduce exactly to order, in order, with all parts functioning correctly, time after time. Any disorderliness is a clear threat to their survival, and a rigid cellular discipline prevails—a sort of constant cellular ‘housekeeping’ is carried on in which wholeness or ‘wholesomeness’ of the cell is the great aim, and anything that is ‘foreign’ (or ‘alterior’) to the cell is rejected. The pool of circulating water that bathes the working cells is kept pristine at all times, within a chemical variation of only 1 per cent: any more variation and the cells would start to die.3
You are what you eat—and your body takes the best, and leaves the rest. This job is done by the larger organs in the hydraulic system now called ‘elimination’ (formerly known as ‘the evacuations’). Everything we eat or drink goes into the stomach and slowly passes through the small intestines, by which time most of the nourishment or ‘goodness’ has been absorbed. The liver rearranges the products of digestion that are distributed to the other tissues by the blood supply; the kidneys filter the blood and keep the cellular water pool clean, excreting waste products as urine. By the time the food reaches the colon whatever remains is surplus to requirements, and ready to be ejected through the bowels via the anus. Human excreta or dung consists mostly of water, dead bacteria, and cells, indigestible matter, and various gases and chemicals, such as bilirubin, which is made when the body takes old blood cells apart—bilirubin is a brown colour. Watery fluids also seep out of other orifices such as the mouth, nose, and eyes, but also with great consistency through the pores of the skin, which act like one-way valves, keeping us cool—and moist, and scented—with oily waste matter (hold your arm against a sunlit wall and you can see the vapours of perspiration steadily evaporating from it). Dead dry matter is also continually falling away from our outer bodies. We shed skin, hair, and toenail clippings, and generally dispose of quantities of waste matter minute by minute, day by day, year in year out—normally between 3 and 6 ounces a day, or 4 tons in the average lifetime. Between 75 and 80 per cent of vacuum cleaner dirt consists of human skin cells.
The next layer in the body’s homeostatic self-defensive response system are the delicately built sense organs, hard-wired into our psyche: the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin—sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. This is where the psychology of cleansing comes in. The sense organs are the brain’s external antennae, connecting the body to the outside world, and it is they that detect all foreign or alterior bodies approaching or entering the organism, and ruthlessly guide our responses. The brain supports one particularly formidable physiological safety net: the nervous reflex of disgust and repulsion. Disgust is certainly a primary reaction. Most mammals show their nervous reactions of distaste or disgust by turning away, averting the eyes, shaking the paws, or wrinkling the nose—though with less of the more extreme reactions of disgust such as a spitting or vomiting. In humans actual loathing is nervous and immediate, triggered by any or all of the senses. Odours, for example, send their message directly to the 5 million receptor cells in the nasal mucus and down into the olfactory regions that ‘are yellow, richly moist, and full of fatty substances … the deeper the shade, the keener and more acute the sense of smell … The effect is immediate and undiluted by language, thought, or translation.’ (Or as one fourteenth-century scientific encyclopedia put it: ‘And the air with the likeness and quality of fumiosity comes suddenly unto the sinew of smelling and presenteth thereto the likeness of the vapour of the fumiosity that is printed in that air.’)4 In one famous experiment, a group of volunteers were given a full-face blast of animal excrement (skatole) and paid good money to withstand it as long as they could. None lasted more than five minutes. The nostrils flared, the face turned away and went pale, the heart rate went down, blood pressure up, sweat poured onto the skin, and finally the stomach started to convulse. It was the pure disgust response in action, located deep in the insula, the area of the brain that malfunctions in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which causes them to wash and clean things endlessly, or vacuum endlessly, most of the day. It is the total opposite of the gross self-neglect that is often a sign of clinical depression.5
Biologically speaking, the neurology and chemistry of ‘delight’ plays a crucial part in animal grooming and nurture. The opposite of sensuous disgust is sensuous ‘delight’—all those things ‘that pleaseth and comforteth the brain wonderfully’. Delight is a psychology—we crave our delights. True delight, according to the poets and philosophers, consists of things that pleasure all the senses: good food, fine music, sweet smells, soft caresses, sheer beauty. The effects of cleansing and cleanliness can genuinely be counted as one of life’s great pleasures—gladdening the eye, sweetening the taste, inviting the touch, and delighting the nose. Delight has not yet been as much studied as disgust; but the ‘attractive’ sense chemistry and sense neurology is apparently just as necessary to the body as the more negative feelings of repulsion or fear.
We display the release of the body’s pleasure-giving chemical opiates, the endorphins, through broad smiles, a lowered heart rate, relaxed muscles, widened eyes, increased eloquence, or speechless laughter. The welcoming smile is as universal as the repulsing frown, and babies have the smile very quickly after birth. Most of the early delights we feel as babies are directly related to the sense of touch, and are all to do with being fed, nuzzled, handled, and enveloped in adult arms in that close tactility we call ‘love’—and much of that is parental grooming; later on, we also take delight in touching and grooming our sexual partners. Zoologists have artificially stimulated grooming bouts by using hormones and peptides; but a soft caressing touch is all that is needed to stimulate the production of the opiate endorphins and damp down the pathways in the nervous system: the heart rate goes down significantly. In other words, being groomed produces mildly narcotic effects; and the longer it carries on, the more swooning or relaxing effects it achieves.6 These periods of relaxed ‘de-arousal’ are carefully timed. Generally speaking, animal grooming occurs in gaps between energetic primary activities: i.e. before or after social contact, sexual activity, or eating, after exploratory or defensive behaviour or gaps in work, and before or after sleeping. During these resting periods peace is restored, and ruffled fur or feathers can be rearranged, repaired, and brought to their normal state of readiness. Grooming thus helps animals relieve stress: it is a useful way of going off duty, of taking a break. Grooming therefore does double duty as work and play (and a surprising amount is play).
The sense of smell is, again, right at the forefront of attraction. Good or ‘fresh’ smells, in particular sweet floral smells, have always been a crucial indicator of wholesome, welcoming cleanliness; to be ‘as fresh as a daisy’ or ‘as sweet as a rose’ is high praise. Attractive smells, lavishly applied, can become an important part of one’s own self-identity: people often choose perfumes, or perfumed toilet soaps, for life. Our body involuntarily produces its own strong and attractive natural odours. Pheromones, discovered with delight in the 1970s, are human sexual scent-markers belonging to the odoriferous glandular system that serves as a mammalian communicator (stink glands, recognition glands, rutting glands, marking glands), which are contained within the apocrine glands under the armpits in particular, coating the long underarm hairs with their oils. Odourless in themselves, their scent is triggered through bacterial decomposition, which produces the sweet or musky smell. The pheromonal sweat of other animals has long been a constituent of musk-based perfume, bringing a feeling of delight that is clearly deeply ingrained in the mammalian psyche. Animal researchers trying to encourage endangered wild cats to breed ‘stumbled on the secret powers of [Calvin Klein’s perfume Obsession] during experiments with ocelots… In captivity the cats are hard to mate, but a little dab of “Obsession” sent the cats into a sexual frenzy.’7
A relatively recent physiological discovery strongly suggests a vital link between human nature and nurture, built into the anatomy of the senses. The human sense organs are pre-wired into our brain—but they are also preconditions ‘waiting to be learnt’. In other words, they take on the ‘primary imprint’ of the local environment at birth, and are subsequently fine-tuned by personal cultural experience.8 Only primary imprinting can explain the wide range of sense cosmologies throughout the world. There is not even any universal agreement on the physical existence of the five senses: some population groups have always thought there are more, or fewer; the Tzotzil of Mexico judge things by heat quality; other peoples prioritize the sense of smell, or hearing, or touch; the famous five-sense European classification was laid down by the ancient Greeks.9 Cultural anthropologists and psychologists now detect different degrees of sensual tolerance in all sorts of different social situations. It has become obvious, for example, that the tolerance of strong smells and tastes has declined among the world’s wealthier populations, for whatever reason; in much the same way, possibly, as visual and aural sensitivities (and particularly the sense of inviolable personal private space—when to touch or not to touch) can evidently become more refined or acutely sensitized (or desensitized) under certain conditions, or with certain individuals.
All we know for sure is that there is obviously a deep psychology of slime, dirt, and stickiness that all hominids apparently share, in different degrees. Close physical contact with other people’s bodily wastes is generally and universally thought to be rather repulsive, and it is for precisely these reasons that extended contact with human waste matter (laundering, rubbish clearance) is commonly assigned to the lowest human rank, class, caste, or gender.10 Jean-Paul Sartre noted that different individuals, as well as different age groups, can have different ‘thresholds of tolerance’ to dirt. To a certain extent this can be seen in the developmental psychology of children and food-taking. Babies are not born with a full sense of disgust to ‘dirty’ foods, but only a vague sense of danger, distaste, or simple aversion, rather like animals. By the age of 4 they are more suspicious but still fairly casual, but by the age of 8 they react just like adults.11 By adulthood our dislike of dirt, or any other signs of deadly decay, is so strong that we tend to avoid touching, tasting, smelling, looking at, or even speaking or writing about, dirt and dirty things. No doubt there is also a genetic component connected to each individual’s dirt threshold—we all know people who seem to have been born clean and tidy, those who acquire cleanness and tidiness, and those who definitely have to have it thrust upon them. The anthropologist Mary Douglas freely acknowledged that ‘my other source of inspiration has been my husband. In matters of cleanness his threshold of tolerance is so much lower than my own that he more than anyone else has forced me into taking a stand on the relativity of dirt.’12
By adulthood we are more or less trained to reject dirt in any form, and to practise some basic cleansing habits—in the twenty-first century, teeth-cleaning, hair-combing, going to the toilet, face- and hand-washing (young humans also have to learn how to get dressed). The role of human parenting in passing down information, and establishing routine patterns of personal hygiene behaviour, should not be underestimated either in prehistory or later. Trained habits inculcated by human parents during the early years are essential social skills: children can physically survive without them, but without human rules and etiquette they behave more like sensuous animals. The sociologist and historian Norbert Elias for one was convinced that toilet-training was the initial stage of human civilization, and seemed to him genuinely to explain a gradual bio-psychological refinement of human manners and habits over time—of thousands of generations of parents repeating or improving on what their parents had shown and told them.13
Toilet-training—or in adults, the act of performing your ‘toilet’—is in fact part of a whole repertoire of grooming behaviour, common to all species. ‘Grooming’ is the old generic word that was commonly used to describe everything that we would now call personal hygiene. Grooming is our final physiological defence system, taking place ‘outside’, on the exposed surfaces of the body, in direct response to the environment. It is a behaviour trait that employs all the senses and looks after all the body parts. External surface grooming is so central to the history of human cleanliness (and medicine) that it is strange we know so little about it. Even social anthropology has studiously ignored human grooming; and although we so often see animal grooming live, close up, on screen, sadly no one has yet filmed similar behaviour with human subjects. It is grooming that saves the body from falling into disrepair, the same grooming that induces respect, or perhaps finds us a mate. As medicine it is both foreseeing (preventive) and healing (therapeutic). As a social system it is mind-boggling.
Animal grooming habits are the only possible model for human grooming behaviour, and help fill the inevitable gaps left in the historical record. The detailed observation of animal grooming systems in zoology originated some forty years ago from small specialist studies of COBS (care of the body surfaces). COBS grooming patterns are now routinely mapped out, and the animal ethology of grooming has become one of the main methods of establishing species group dynamics—physical hygiene is regarded as almost a minor function.14 Significantly, our primate cousins have the biggest ‘grooming budgets’ of all mammals, grooming between 10 and 20 per cent of their time—‘an enormous commitment’ given the amount of time they need to find food, and far more than they need simply to control infestation.15 Like other animals they not only ‘autogroom’ (grooming one’s self); they also practise long hours of ‘allo-grooming’ (grooming by or for someone else). They may even be practising ‘vocal grooming’.
The basic routine for land animals is the ‘dry grooming’ of the outer hide, or pelage. In most animals each body part is invariably treated in a certain order (generally head to toe) and becomes a separate grooming zone. Each zone has specific requirements and allotted time. Typically, grooming bouts in mammals vary in length between thirty seconds and ten minutes, with the longest bouts in the morning and special attention given more randomly to different parts, at odd moments.16 When the time is right for grooming, the hands and sense organs automatically take over, looking or feeling for encrustations, living parasites, minor lesions, or breaks in the structure—bumps, bruises, scrapes, small wounds, pustules. Primate hands are exceptionally flexible and have a wide range of techniques du corps: scratching, scouring, picking, pricking, probing, pressing, stroking, rubbing, wiping, combing, shaking, tugging, stretching.17 Mammals without hands or forepaws more commonly use their mouth orifices to groom: the main primate mouth-grooming actions are licking, spitting, sucking, nibbling, eating, nipping, and biting. Primates, humans, and certain other mammals also have the curious ‘toothcomb’—the pair of long, pointed, semi-lateral canine teeth which seem to be part of the ‘nibbling’ and ‘scratching’ grooming apparatus, being more sensitive and less rigidly anchored than the other teeth.
Animal grooming has many observable links with later human history. Semi-automatic primate grooming actions are still used today in what we call ‘first aid’—the quick instinctive attention given to oneself by oneself, or to others by parents or intimates. It is difficult to ignore the grooming ‘alert’ that scratches an itch. ‘Relic gestures’ in modern populations include shaking, flicking, or smoothing hair; stretching and rubbing the limbs; feeling and absent-mindedly scratching the skin; brushing, or straightening or adjusting the clothes that form our artificial pelage.18 We still use our tongue and toothcomb publicly to nibble and clean our nails, and pick off skin, or lick small wounds with our anti-bacterial saliva. The well-known practice of removing and then eating ‘snot’ from the nose is always denied or laughed off (by adults); but it is strange to note that while the evacuatory sneeze is instinctive, blowing your nose is a skill that will have to be acquired (sucking obstructive snot from the noses of cold-ridden young babies is a well-known folk remedy, discreetly practised).19
We also still pick out nits. This ancient human occupation, only occasionally documented, has become increasingly shameful and only performed in private. Getting rid of poisonous or unwelcome parasites is, across virtually all species, a primary function of grooming: they can damage the hide and multiply fast unless checked, and only constant vigilance keeps the parasite-load down. Parasites are remarkably host-specific and highly adaptive, even down to their colouring—small white lice try to become invisible in well-groomed fur, while large dark lice wallow luxuriously in poorly groomed fur—and they cannily concentrate themselves in the hard-to-reach areas, where the animal cannot see.20 Human flea and bedbug populations have only very recently been reduced. The human head louse is a remarkably persistent and successful species, hanging on despite combing or brushing, and only losing grip when lathered with conditioner or dying under an onslaught of chemicals. But the chatty social occasions when we all sit around allo-grooming and picking nits out of each other no longer exist. A rare twentieth-century description from an isolated Russian village billeting Second World War refugees revealed a symbiotic relationship between the village lice and the village people:
The village was full of lice. Hannah poured petrol on their clothes and burned them. They put paraffin on their hair to get rid of the lice. But for the villagers, lice were part of their daily life. Every Friday after they bathed, they would put their heads in someone’s lap, look for lice, and squash them between a knife and a fingernail. ‘That was their pastime’ says Rosa.21
The phenomenon of animal (and human) ‘group allo-grooming’ gives weight to the distinct possibility that the grooming may have helped to develop human speech skills. With primates especially, it has been found that the larger the group, the more time is spent grooming—mainly because they are literally having to ‘stay in touch’ with more individuals. But for any bigger population groups (say over 120–30 bodies) touch and eye contact alone would become unfeasible, and may have been supplemented by a type of grunting, cooing, or muttering speech form that has been described as ‘vocal grooming’.22 It is tempting to see vocal grooming as the precursor of human ‘gossip’—the sort of mindless nattering, chattering, or free-association vocal sessions that assert status and relay the most intimate news and views. Young hominid females have it in abundance. Certainly in later periods of history, gossip was inextricably linked with key grooming areas: bathhouses, barber’s shops, roof terraces, courtyards, and bedrooms.
Equally fascinating are the group dynamics of animal grooming—the social politics of grooming. Allo-grooming may have been vastly more important in the past than it seems to be now (though it still reappears before festive occasions) and human history is replete with grooming hierarchies, life-cycle grooming, allo-grooming, and medical mutual aid. In the animal world, an individual’s chances of a safe passage through life increase hugely through being assisted and generally cared for by others, and solitary animals are at a grave disadvantage in this respect. Allo-grooming is the basic technique behind all nursing care: the fact that another pair of eyes can often detect small problems before they become large ones, keep watch on your back—or help you through a major medical crisis.23 Nothing more strongly suggests social cohesion in prehistory than the discovery that many skeletons and well-preserved ancient bodies had obviously been groomed, nursed, and given medical aid. The prime example of medical mutual aid would have been childbirth: there is a 20,000-year-old cave picture of a pregnant woman in labour, surrounded by a circle of figures, in northern Brazil. A surprising number of Neolithic skeletons had been ‘trepanned’ (a hole made in the skull) while still alive; yet others have survived broken limbs that have been set, and limbs that have been amputated. The business of rearing infants and nursing adults would have been (as in tribal communities today) very much the work of the entire family, extended kin included; and all life-and-death decisions would have been tackled on the spot (as they still are in isolated areas). There were no specialized ‘doctors’ then, but a great many carers and allo-groomers with time on their hands. At one Neolithic cave site it was estimated that food-gathering took up as little as twenty hours per week per person, or roughly three hours a day.24 The famous traveller who froze to death on a Tyrolean pass in c.3300 BCE was aged 25–40, had worn teeth and arthritis but excellent internal organs (with lungs blackened by fire smoke), had survived severe illnesses, was healing several broken bones, and had small tattoos set in groups on either side of his spine, possibly for back pain. He was also shaved and beardless, and had recently had his hair cut.
1 Primates grooming—an intense and loving experience. Careful observation and nit-picking is essential grooming care for all animals, including primates.
All regular animal grooming bouts are finely tuned to the politics of social status. It appears that grooming is such a valuable skill—perhaps the only resource the giver has to trade with—that it is often politic and self-seeking. Primates in particular use grooming as a way up the social ladder, and as part of a social reward system: the more powerful you are, the more attention you will get. Through grooming friendships are sealed, and intimate groups are formed: ‘a light touch, a gentle caress, can convey all the meanings in the world… Knowing which meaning to infer is the very basis of social being…’.25 The choice of grooming partners is highly deliberate. The most important social divisions in the primate world are between young and old, kin and non-kin, and male and female. Rank and power go to the strongest member of the family (and to whichever natal gender group is in charge). There is some flexibility, but on the whole a top-down grooming hierarchy prevails. The powerful ‘A’ ranks—alpha males and alpha females—are groomed more than others, by others, and allo-groom less than others. ‘B’-ranking groups, male and female, are usually the busiest overall, grooming both up and down the chain. ‘C’-ranking males and females—often outsiders or unmatched males or females—get least attention of all. But even such powerful social divisions seem to be as much for guidance as a rigid rule; it ultimately all depends on circumstances, and self-interest.
Grooming ‘peaks’ occur over the life cycle, and the very young get preference over all ranks. After the birth, primate mothers allo-groom incessantly, up to 20 per cent of their time (approximately twice that spent on their own grooming needs) but maternal concern quickly eases off. The second most important grooming peak in a young primate—and young human’s—life is the time of sexual maturity, courtship, and sexual display. For sexual success, health and beauty are a winning combination—females especially like to get good value from their mate. Good grooming enhances the sexual signals, and both sexes will attempt to display themselves as well groomed and well kept, and often select their partners by giving or soliciting grooming. In the last phase of the life cycle, old age and death, both auto and allo-grooming drop to a new low. Among elderly humans, a poor sense of smell (and reduced vision) is often the prelude to a decline in personal grooming. Powerlessness and helplessness are a lethal combination. Highranking males and females are displaced, and themselves become supplicants, at the mercy of the new rank-holders. Again, survival depends largely on individual circumstances and ability. In one chimpanzee group one old male was groomed by the alpha male, but never returned the grooming—he was still a key player in the group’s politics.26 At the end, though, primate death is a private affair, a last retreat into the bushes. It would be inconceivable for other primates to ‘lay out’ or publicly groom the body after death, as hominid primates do.
In the very earliest periods of human society, grooming was governed only by biology; but the next sedimentary layer in the history of personal hygiene was the arrival of human artificial technology. By slow degrees the biological body of early Homo sapiens became refined, retuned, towards a range of new sensory experiences—smells, sounds, textures, colours, tastes—most of which are now wholly taken for granted, but at the time must have seemed miraculous. They were certainly deeply embedded in the Late Neolithic spiritual world. Medical materialism, on its own, is never going to be a sufficient explanation of human attitudes towards cleansing. Cleansing is a mechanical physical process, but in the human psyche it developed imaginatively and gained an invisible moral dimension that we have lived with ever since—cleanliness as a moral virtue. Moral cleanliness was and is inevitably a subjective or qualitative assessment; but the judgement between the ‘right’ way and the ‘wrong’ way of proceeding through life is the point where natural technology and human morality (or psychology) overlap. Technology has its own inviolable rules and cleansing disciplines; so does religion. Human cleansing behaviour has long been ruled by strict personal discipline, orderliness, and regimen, and some history of human routines, spatial rules, and the psychology of ‘order’ has to be invoked if we want to track down these long historical changes.
The great achievements of Neolithic peoples were the artificial or ‘applied’ technologies (or techne) created by their hands and brains, which they used to safeguard and enrich their domestic lives. There was a definite surge of technical (and religious) innovation in personal hygiene and cleansing following the Cro-Magnon migration from Africa into Eurasia and beyond, from around 40,000 to c.3000 BCE—a dynamic period normally known as the Neolithic, or Late Stone Age.27 During this period Homo sapiens sapiens developed a strong physical dependence on specific places and artificial objects, shared with other animals, that zoologists call ‘environmental physiology’. Many if not most of our domestic artificial cleansing skills were developed during the Late Stone Age, alongside the vernacular architecture that emerged in innumerable varieties, on all continents. Protective artificial nesting-places snugly surrounded the throbbing human body organism, filled up with ‘belongings’, and became the body’s known habitus—which, like anything else in close contact with the body, had to be cleansed and kept whole.28 Manual surface-grooming, food preparation, and domestic cleaning took turns in ministering to the body and its needs; many of the actions, indeed, were the same.
The social division of space, and the separation of domestic functions, are at the root of all house- and body-cleaning operations. Inasmuch as the brain has an innate spatial and visual ‘ordering’ ability—otherwise we could not physically perform at all—it is usually concerned with snap-second judgements; but these instincts clearly also extend to the wider environment. In Anglo-Saxon the verb ‘to order’ (Middle English ordren) has two distinct meanings—prioritization and soundness: ‘to give order or arrangement to; to put in order; to set or keep in proper condition; to dispose according to rule; to regulate, govern, manage;-to settle’. (As a noun, it is rank order or full classification: i.e. the order of all things.) The philosopher Plato once described cleansing (katharmos), logically, as the science of division—‘of the kind of division that retains what is better but expels the worst’—and commented that ‘every division of that kind is universally known as purification’. This is an almost exact philosophical description of housework, which deals with the orderly inflow and outflow of matter, and the purification of ‘matter out of place’, on a daily basis.29
Having a sense of space and place is obviously psychologically important for humans, who will still mark out and divide even the tiniest of corners, under the most difficult of conditions (as, for example, during imprisonment). Neolithic nesting arrangements would have been rather similar to those still used in the small spaces of a modern tent, boat, or caravan: small rooms, severely functional, holding just a few well-used basic objects, but with each object in its exact place.30 At the famous Neolithic settlement on the island of Skara Brae in the Orkneys between 3100 and 2500 BCE, six small interlinked stone-built houses were built to a remarkable standard of Stone Age convenience and comfort. Each contained a large amount of stone-built furniture: stone ‘dressers’ with several shelves, stone water tanks, bed-shelves and built-in hearths, and a drop-latrine built into an outside wall (they also had complete command of a beer-brewing technology).31 Our knowledge of the history of Neolithic domestic surface technology, and domestic cleaning tools, is negligible; all we know for sure is that housework has to be connected to the worldwide history of building materials. The Sumerians, for instance, invented glazed mud bricks (ceramics); the ancient Egyptians (and the Chinese) coated their interior house walls with anti-verminal plaster. Stone or wooden habitats were perhaps easier to keep clean, but earthen floors and woven vegetation (with or without a smooth cladding) were probably the norm. In addition, there is the insufficiently analysed effect of the so-called string revolution—a ‘joining’ technology that neatly complemented the more-famous ‘cutting’ stone technology. First came the single twisted thread of some vegetable fibre, then the double or triple twisted string, then the weaving of the plait, the rope, and the net—all with multiple uses for storage, hunting, adornment, and, of course, the eventual development of brushes, cloths, and clothing.32
Storage—on shelves or in nets, pots, bags, or boxes—is an efficient and inherently ‘ordered’ system, and one that the people of the Late Stone Age apparently invented out of sheer necessity. Cleanness, neatness, and tidiness in ‘stowing’ or storing and maintaining objects would always have been necessary not only for their own survival, but for their owner’s survival, if they were essential objects. Cleaning up is a sign of finishing the job. Modern machine manufacture is also dependent on a cleansing work discipline—and even a modern building specification can yield a rich mix of historic terminology: ‘Cleaning: chip, scrape, disc sand and grind surfaces to remove all fins, burrs, sharp edges, weld spatter, loose rust and loose scale. Clean out all crevices. Thoroughly degrease …’.33
In Old English, ‘clean’ itself appears to have been a rather overworked generic word that was used, initially, to describe dainty physical forms. The root word clene is derived from the Old High German clacne or clani, in turn derived from the verb stem kli-klai, meaning ‘to stick’; the Old High German root firmly gives the meaning as ‘clear’ with an additional meaning of ‘littleness’—neat, delicate, fine, tiny, small, and puny (see also sweet, cute)—with similar echoes in Icelandic. The moral definitions evidently arrived later. ‘Clean-liness’ is definitely a later, suffixed word that seems to embody a new level of cultural generalization; as do the well-known later ‘compound’ pairings such as ‘clean ‘n’ decent’, ‘clean ‘n’ tidy’, or ‘sweet ‘n’ clean’. (For the record, ‘pure’ is a Middle English French-Latin import, while ‘hygiene’ is a seventeenth-century Greek-Latin import.)34
Human rubbish radiates out from the source, and putting human faeces ‘outside’—anywhere immediately past the domus threshold—is universal behaviour. Neolithic middens were typically located directly outside the habitation, with further rubbish dumps on the outer boundaries of the settlement. The near-universal and ancient ‘dry’ sewage sanitary system, still found in isolated rural areas, consisted of indoor sand, ash, or earth buckets that were dumped on outdoor middens, and subsequently scavenged for fertilizer or fuel. Toilet habits apparently divide universally into ‘washers’ or ‘wipers’—and most ancient peoples were wipers: ‘These words refer to how people clean themselves after they have excreted. Washers use water, wipers use some solid material like grass, leaves, paper, sticks, corncobs, mudballs, or stones.’ The drop-latrine at Skara Brae was yet another example of advanced Neolithic hydraulic technology. Drop-latrines were vertical hollow shafts built on an outside (stone) wall down which the solids dropped and the water flowed, with a receptacle or pit to collect the final waste.35
On Skara Brae the middens grew so large that the famous stone-lined and covered corridors were actually built in order to drive a clean and sheltered passageway between the huts, which later themselves became completely enclosed by their middens.
To appreciate the level of comfort and containment eventually reached we can look at the traditional ground plan and furniture of the tented Mongolian ger (or yurt). Inside the ger, the circular space was divided not only into halves but into quarters, according to categories of gender and purity. Men and women sat and slept on opposite sides of the tent; the dirty cooking and cleaning area was on the women’s side in the quarter nearest the exit flap, and the sacred space was on the men’s side in the quarter at the back. The domestic artefacts in the ger were packed into boxes, chests, nets, and bags; and as a further flourish it was decorated with glittering and crafted objects, including decorative traditional clothing produced on important occasions.36 This was a survival kit—a life that could be packed within hours and hauled across plains, rivers, and mountains, all based on Neolithic technology. In the end, domestic cleanliness is always entirely relative, and psychological. Although you could not ignore the muddy, weather-beaten, and extreme conditions of life in the wilderness, you could if you were lucky mitigate them—soften the harsh surfaces, add touches of refinement, and keep things separate, dry, and unsoiled. In theory, even in the Neolithic the most makeshift accommodation could have been to its owner (in the words of a twenty-first-century migrant refugee living in a hut made of flattened oil-cans, hung with embroidered cloths) ‘my beautiful house’.37
Distancing yourself from poisons, dust, and dirt is one thing; but distancing yourself from invisibly ‘unclean’ people and objects is quite an achievement of the imagination. Animals maintain certain social boundaries and distances, but they have no conception of a dirt demon. The metaphysical or sacred dimensions of the ger were clearly just as important to its inhabitants as its physical dimensions, which were so carefully arranged to reflect their cosmological beliefs in the workings of the universe. Religious purity has a distinct role in the history of personal hygiene. It was not functional, not rational, and more often than not completely illusory; but it was a key cultural component that determined the lives and cleansing behaviour of very large numbers of people.
Religious purity rules and prohibitions are a social phenomenon that developed over many millennia, and still exist worldwide. For a long time they were looked on as a sideline to theology—irrational or magical superstitions that somehow arose from the instinctive or ‘hygienic’ sense of disgust. In her classic work Purity and Danger (1966), Mary Douglas reanalysed their social significance, and showed decisively how and why it was that ‘pollution fear’ came to be universally developed as a method of social control. There was nothing irrational about purity rules: they were a form of social legislation. Pollution psychology, Douglas suggested, is still very much alive today, even in our modern, technological, and highly ‘differentiated’ societies.
Purity and pollution rules vary worldwide in their complexity and intensity, and have always been subject to different geographical, economic, political, and historical processes. There are some societies that place almost no emphasis on metaphysical pollution, like the remote twentieth-century Pygmies; or societies where pollution rules are hierarchically ordered, highly differentiated, and closely regulated, as in the Indian and South-East Asian caste systems. Even within a given geographical region, tribal religious rules could frequently change completely within the space of a few miles; it was the later written religions that imposed common practices over large regions. The dirt-avoidance religious practices that evolved in early societies performed two particular functions. Firstly, they were a type of metaphysical insurance policy, a defence against the physical cracks in the universe. Secondly, they held the body politic together in an orderly set of social relationships.
Purification was an attempt to control the universe through forethought and active intervention. By patrolling and constantly defining the spiritual boundaries and keeping the supernatural defences secure, everything was done to ensure the safety of the group, ward off death, and lengthen the chances of survival. Cosmic harmony was ensured by a series of sacred purificatory rituals directly linked to universal biorhythms (often dedicated to a particular god, goddess, or spirit). Virtually all early cosmologies were rooted in philosophical dualism: the observation of moral ‘polarities’ or opposites in nature—day-night, sun-moon, right-left, man-woman, hot-cold, above-below, inside-outside, life-death.38 In extremely hierarchical systems, dirt slopped and hovered around the bottom rungs of the ladder of creation and was given supernatural physical form: no religious system has such lively dirt demons as the coprophiliac, shit-eating, ‘hungry ghosts’ of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhism—the thirty-six gaki zoshi ghosts, and the seven po spirits that live in the body, who delight in filth, turn their back on life, and are fixated on death: ‘the ones with bodies like cauldrons, those with needlethin throats, vomit eaters, excrement eaters, nothing-eaters, eaters of vapours in the air, eaters of the Buddhist dharma, water-drinkers, hopeful and ambitious ones, saliva eaters, wig-eaters, blood-drinkers, meat-eaters, consumers of incense smoke, disease-dabblers, defecation-watchers’.39
Naming and isolating the various dirt dangers through regulation and classification reduced them and made them manageable; and elaborate purifications were devised using every element—hot, cold, wet, or dry—with other materials judged by their porosity (from ‘hard and pure’ to ‘soft and impure’) or potency.40 Each local sacred technology was unique, and might remain so under isolated conditions: there is only one tribe of cattle-keeping Todas, ‘the whole basis of whose social organisation is directed towards securing the ceremonial purity of the sacred herds, the sacred dairy, the vessels, the milk [and] the priest-dairyman’.41
People used their eyes, hands, and noses when they took part in these rituals, but by definition, the supernatural was not of this world. As Douglas discovered, lists of ritual dirt ‘abominations’ such as those in the Hebrew text of Leviticus, or those of the tribes of the Lele, Dinka, or Ndembu, held a contradictory message: ‘suddenly we find that one of the most abominable or impossible is singled out and put into a very special kind of ritual frame that marks it off from other experience …Within the ritual frame, the abomination is then handled as a source of tremendous power.’42 So in Judaism hatat blood purged the sanctuary; being scattered with funeral dust cleansed Nyakyusa mourners; in Hinduism all the waste products of the cow were considered holy, and were therefore pure, and purificatory. Many ‘dirty’ but potent ingredients were and still are used in indigenous systems of polypharmacy, including the widespread use of many different dead animal parts as charms (such as the wearing of a rabbit’s foot, or the dung hung in a bag round the neck in ancient Mesopotamia). Hence the imaginative phenomenon that rationality finds so strange—that ritual purity and impurity laws do not refer to observable cleanliness or dirtiness, but to a classified purity status: ‘If you touch a reptile, you may not be dirty, but you are unclean. If you undergo a ritual immersion, you may not be free of dirt, but you are clean.’43
Death was always a major defilement. Physical contagion (‘catching’ a poison through air, liquid, or by touch) may have been a recognized phenomenon; but ancient Homo sapiens clearly thought there was far more to death than that. Stringent isolation and purification rites were imposed on the polluted corpse, its home, and its relatives, after death. Widows and widowers, or anyone who had to touch the corpse, were especially unclean. In some societies, the death of a chief could cause defilement so great that it sometimes entailed the abandonment of the settlement; while death defilement could even affect family members who were nowhere near at the time; or was even inherited through several generations. There was another gamble with death contained in the ritual of scapegoating—the ‘transference’ of badness or bad luck to another body, thereby purging and renewing your own; and, with a similar motive, in certain types of ritual wounding or ritual murder (such as the killing of kings).44
The opposite of death and decay was life and goodness; wholeness and purity were supernaturally linked to regeneration and fertility. Agricultural rebirth or regeneration was marked in many New Year equinox ceremonies. All early gods, goddesses, and spirits were elemental, and usually fecund; but fertility goddesses were particularly associated with the earth, spring, and water, especially running water. Spring-time bathing festivals have everywhere been used to signify new-year renewal; anyone who has watched the (televised) mass purifications of the Kumbh Mela festival that take place by the Ganges in India each January can easily appreciate the potential scale of these ancient water rituals.45 ‘Hypogenic’ or sacred water architecture from 16,000 BCE has been found in Sardinia, where the Nuraghi peoples worshipped their enormous Great Goddess in round stone temples built over sacred wells; as the distribution of the famous so-called ‘Venus’ figurines show, the very early Neolithic worship of fertile female ‘fat goddesses’ covered most of western Europe from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean.
In the emerging world of ‘Homo hierarchicus’, to be born a polluting low-caste ‘untouchable’, or a chosen excluded one (the living human equivalent of a dirt demon), was a fairly nasty fate.46 Transitional states—which represented formlessness, dirt, and disintegration—messed up the tidy divisions of holiness. Thus unusual anomalies in nature, or marginal people who crossed social, physical, or metaphysical boundaries—‘outsiders’—were especially likely to be polluted, or polluting. Primate Homo sapiens sapiens was also well aware of the times and occasions when extra care was required in the human life cycle, particularly those parts of the cycle where the body was in some form of major transitional (and dirt-ridden) relationship with the external world—as at birth, puberty, pregnancy, or death. Every substance that issued or fell away from the body was transitional and therefore suspect (saliva, blood, urine, sperm, sweat, vomit, faeces, hair, and nail clippings). Food intake was closely monitored.
According to these rules of transition women were the main polluters. Menstruation was contained and controlled by purity rules and seclusion, while menstruating women were often believed to be contaminators of food; pregnant or post-partum women were frequently separated off from the entire community as well as their own household, sometimes for months. Sex pollution or chastity rules (such as purdah) required ritual seclusion inside the home, both before and after marriage, even though these politic rules that so carefully protected fertile women on behalf of the male line could easily be self-defeating if not enough females were allowed to procreate, or indeed do useful work.47 For both males and females, however, the puberty initiation ceremonies that marked the arrival of new sexual emissions were often severe tests of bodily endurance, cathartic privation, and ritual purification. After the rites the young adult was, like chrysalis to butterfly, transformed into his or her new adult ‘skin’, fully displayed in the ceremonial dancing and sexual peacocking which followed—among the South African Xhosa, the red ochre painted on your newly purified body was supposed to be rubbed off in the arms of your future wife.48 Betrothal and marriage ceremonies were more festive occasions: the worldwide rituals of preparatory purification, grooming, bathing, and dressing up of the bride and groom were yet another time of extensive group bonding, when every effort was made to bring about good luck, and expel evil influences.
There can be no such thing as ‘total holiness’, and the religious imagination frequently collided with hard reality.49 Whatever happened to you depended to a large extent on your immediate circumstances—religion, age, gender, or purity status. But everyone was involved in the duty of self-patrol. On a day-to-day level, ritual purifications stopped anything ‘bad’ from entering the body, and protected the body from what it touched: from casual contact, formal contact, contact between old and new, contact with strangers, contact with strange things. If you were not vigilant (or were deceitful) most likely someone would be vigilant for you. It was part of politics, a way of living within, and not outside, your own society. Although there have always been certain societies, places, and occasions, where religious writ did not run and human life continued along older paths, so that more people lived outside elite circles of spiritual purity than lived within them, nevertheless it seems that once the sense of a metaphysical or psychological purity danger was alerted or imprinted on a group, it could become a source of communal tension that was difficult to eradicate or deny, and created a new source of power that could be exploited for political ends. To read purity rules fully, Mary Douglas once said, ‘you must always ask who is being excluded’; adding ‘the only thing that is universalistic about purity is the temptation to use it as a weapon’.50
We come back to earth with the human toilette, which was very much a celebration of the living human form and a constant reminder of the endless human labour that was going on behind the scenes. We have already investigated the biology of personal hygiene; and purity rules have shown how the skin could become a significant cultural boundary between the self and the world. But for many people today there is one sole and sufficient reason for practising personal hygiene that eclipses all others: self-representation. It was at some time during the Neolithic that the body became an artwork. The human capacity for aesthetics must surely have been one of those ontological prewired conditions waiting to be learnt, ready to be sharpened and inspired by all the sensuous colours, smells, and forms displayed in nature. Neolithic technology gave us most of the cosmetic body-art we have today, including the specific decoration of the different body parts, and the clothing styles and adornments that became, in effect, an artificial ‘second skin’. Washing and bathing the human body also required artificial technologies all of their own, and are only partly natural.51
Although it was technological expertise that perfected highart Neolithic body culture, there were a number of animal grooming techniques around that could have been observed, copied, and refined. Animals regularly use water, mud, or dust baths. Apes and chimpanzees are especially fond of tools (and toys) and frequently use stones for massage, twigs for cleaning teeth, or bundles of leaves like towels or napkins. Animals also scent and oil themselves; a whole new world of zoopharmacognancy—the discovery and use of natural drugs by animals—opens up when we consider the small white-nosed coati who go to a particular aspen tree to wallow or rub themselves with camphor resin once a day; or the spider monkeys who use a citrus tree in much the same way.52
But the unique methods of human skin decoration only worked on a clean or naked canvas. The gradual loss—or adaptation of—human body hair (fur) over millions of years gave the final shape to human grooming habits. In the tropical and semi-tropical zones where bipedal hominids originated, hairlessness is supposed to have been a heat advantage; though in colder regions, artificial clothing became another adaptive heat advantage as a replacement furred hide—which of course is what such costumes were made of, in the days before artificial cloth. Growing population numbers may have been another cause of change. Lacking other natural markings on their pelage, the body-painting, hairstyling, and other adornments that distinguished human beings from other beasts presumably made them more readily and easily identifiable to each other, especially from a distance.
All Neolithic body-art was and still is an ‘art for the parts’, in that each different body part or grooming zone goes to make up the decorative whole, and any or all of the grooming zones can be emphasized for special artistic attention. Thus the eyes, nose, ears, mouth, hair, neck, arms, hands, fingernails, breasts, waist, navel, legs, feet, ankles, and toes have all been given decorative forms everywhere. Particularly elaborate hand and nail art, for example, still survives in South-East Asia; and hair art in Africa; but nothing quite matches the cosmetic dental art of tooth-filing and coloured tooth-inlays—tooth art—practised among the ancient Aztecs.53 The condition of the skin was always considered especially important. It was either well oiled and glossy or (as in Namibia and many other places worldwide) carefully rubbed over with the ochre-coloured earth; both treatments also help against infestation and sunburn. The African Nuba tribe have words to describe each different style of body movement, every visible muscle on the body (and even the indentations between them), and five different types of skin abrasions: ‘if a man has … a minor abrasion, he will not paint or call attention to his body in any way; dry, flaky skin is not merely considered unattractive, it signifies that a person has removed himself from normal social intercourse’.54
The earliest human body idols from southern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East are ubiquitously painted with red ochre, over-painted by stripes of other colours, particularly chalk white, and the blue, yellow, and black vegetable dyes (woads). One 42,000 BCE cave settlement on a beach at the tip of southern Africa has revealed evidence of red ochre paints and a paint-grinding stone set just within the cave entrance.55 Other forms of radical body manipulation—tattooing, circumcision, body-branding, the stretching of earlobes, necks, mouths, and noses, ring-piercing, the binding and moulding of arm and leg bones, waists, feet, and skulls—depended entirely on the specialized skills of whatever community you were born into. Skin-tattooing had appeared on all continents by the Late Neolithic, but found a particular home in the southern Pacific; in New Guinea today the Roro people will describe the untattooed person as ‘raw’, comparing him unfavourably with uncooked meat. Contemporary Melanesian body-art involves tattoos, scarification, teeth-blackening, penis gourds, noseplugs, earplugs, and much casual ornamentation of leaves, flowers, fur, or feathers.56
From around 30,000 to 40,000 BCE the ornamental layer seems to have developed fast, as the string revolution started to kick in. The world’s earliest rock art and sculptures show figures with head ornaments, fringed armbands, beaded girdles, and braided hairstyling; while a large industrial bead-making site from c.30,000 BCE at Dolní Věstonice, in the Czech Republic, has been described as the ‘New York of the Palaeolithic’: finds there included exotic beaded costumes, braids, hats, ropes, nets, and a very extensive ceramics industry.57 One of the most spectacular early Eurasian burial sites is at Sunghir’ in Russia, dated around 24,000 BCE, where the bodies of two high-status children were found wearing full-length costumes sewn with 3,500 mammoth ivory beads; other graves contained ivory bracelets, pendants, necklaces, and rings. Such graves prove beyond doubt that, ‘weather permitting’, as one archaeologist rather quaintly put it, ‘Ice Age people may have been dressed and decorated with more elegance than generally imagined.’58 In fact the children must have been dazzling in life as well as in death. Cloth and clothing technology developed even faster during the ‘secondary products revolution’ of the Eurasian Bronze Age from c.4000 BCE, when ivory, stone, pottery, and wood products were rivalled by metal.59 Fine cosmetic tools became prestigious grave goods—especially the burnished bronze mirrors that enabled people to study their own face and hair closely and conveniently for the first time, alongside well-made combs, knives, paint palettes, and small metal water buckets. One of the best-preserved bodies we have from the ancient past is the ice mummy, or ‘Ice Maiden’, from the Iron Age Pazyrick tribe in Siberia, a high-class female buried around 400 BCE. Her whole body was tattooed with stylized trees and flowers all over the neck, back, and chest, with two deer, whose antlers flowed wavelike up both arms. Her next ornamental layer was a white silk embroidered blouse, a red dress, a long red sash, thigh-length red leather boots, necklaces, and a 3-foot-high headdress—which took up a third of the coffin—carved and coated with golf leaf. Also buried with her were her horses, her drinking cup—and her face mirror.60 By that time the new metal technology was simply an extra bonus.
And what of water, that supreme ingredient of modern personal hygiene? And how do we account for the rise and ubiquity of hot water? Clean drinking water was of course the first human necessity: anything else was a luxury well beyond the norm. The long story of washing and bathing water began in the Neolithic at some indeterminate date, but probably (since it required extra resources and labour) during the later periods of relative prosperity and economic surplus. Later Neolithic technology seems to have risen to the challenge of water, with ingenious solutions to the problems of both fresh water and drainage. The large, square, stone water containers of the Late Neolithic (like those at Skara Brae) were the first form of domestic water supply, and were also quite capable of boiling a large amount of water when heated with hot stones from the fire. Water could be brought from the source in leather, pottery, wood, or shell containers; but the more convenient light and portable metal basins and buckets only start to appear in the records during the Bronze Age. Bath-tanks, using even larger quantities of water for full-body bathing (not to mention clothes-laundering), seem to have accompanied the civic hydraulic sanitary engineering that was certainly one of the wonders of Late Neolithic technology—in Mohenjo-Daro, Knossos, Carthage, or Rome.
There was also a natural template for the human use of luxurious heated baths. Neolithic tribal groups undoubtedly discovered most of the world’s extra-ordinary natural waters during their nomadic wanderings. Cold-water springs, rivers, and lakes might be innately sacred and healing; but the world’s naturally heated waters must have been even more fascinating and awe-inspiring. There are hot springs worldwide in Africa, North and South America, Australia and New Zealand, Siberia, Iceland, Japan, and elsewhere. The planet’s volcanic geothermal systems produce water in many different temperatures and forms, ranging (in Europe) from the ‘sweating grottoes’ in the rocks near the Greek thermae of Aedepsos, to the calcium hot pools circling the extinct volcano of Monte Amiata in central Italy, and the hot mud wallows at Dalyan in Turkey. It is likely that nomadic routes developed around the hot-spring systems on all continents (like the aboriginal ‘walkabout’ water-hole routes known to have existed in Australia), and the hot springs seem to have played a significant part in human settlement patterns. For instance, many if not most of the highly decorated Upper Palaeolithic sacred cave systems in the French Pyrenees and the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain are within walking distance of important hot-spring sites, also later exploited by the Romans.61
Japan, of course, is the outstanding example of an ancient hot-spring folk culture, and has some of the world’s most lengthy and fastidious bathing rituals. In Japan hot springs even come up under the sea, as on the westernmost island of Kyushu, where the ocean reaches temperatures of 32° C (104° F) and where (in later times and as in thermal Iceland) almost every house had a thermal bath. Remnants of Japan’s past could still be witnessed in the early twentieth century, when the Kamchadales tribe still took long annual treks to the hot springs, putting up their tents and staying for several weeks.62 Similar ancient tribal gatherings and parties around hot springs were witnessed in nineteenth-century central Africa (and North America) where ‘the inhabitants came in large groups, and the business of bathing, washing, and idling was interspersed with joyful scenes, instrumental music, and barbaric songs’. The same things happened in any Roman thermae—or Finnish sauna.
2 The Terme di Saturnia in Tuscany, one of many springs surrounding the extinct volcano Monte Amiata that local people have used for thousands of years, creating the bathing-basins. The chalky water is pale blue-green, and hot.
Artificial ‘stoving’, or sweat-bathing, may have been another of the skills that the Cro-Magnons took with them from place to place. Sweat huts were common throughout Africa and the Americas, and were particularly favoured in the cold northern zones of western Asia (especially Finland, Russia, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Germanic and old Celtic regions; a few ancient Irish sweat huts still existed in the nineteenth century). At its simplest, the person was wrapped up next to a fire; or covered with hot earth; or put into a sealed hut or tent, and steamed with hot stones and water. The intensive heat therapy relaxed the body and opened the pores of the skin so that the sweat poured out. A bunch of twigs could be used (as in the Finnish and Russian saunas) to further ‘raise the blood’, and stones, shells, or other abrasives used to scour loosened scurf off the skin. Cold air—or a sluice of cold water—restored the body’s median temperature.63
Communal stoving or ‘allo-stoving’ not only made you well, it provided relaxation and ‘good times’. Later on, stoving was particularly associated with spring celebration and marriage parties, or even with burial rites. The remarkable Scythian stoving ritual reported by the Roman author Herodotus was a riotous wake that also served as a purification ceremony:
After a burial the Scythians go through a process of cleaning themselves; they wash their heads with soap, and their bodies in a vapour-bath, the nature of which I shall describe. On a framework of three sticks, meeting at the top, they stretch pieces of woollen cloth, taking care to get the joints as perfect as they can, and inside this little tent they put a dish with red-hot stones in it. Now hemp grows in Scythia, a plant resembling flax but much coarser and taller… They take some hemp seed, creep into the tent, and throw the seed on the hot stones. At once it begins to smoke, giving off a vapour unsurpassed by any vapour bath one could find in Greece. The Scythians enjoy it so much that they howl with pleasure. This is their substitute for an ordinary bath in water, which they never use.64
People obviously dealt with their temperature problems in idiosyncratic ways, and some of them actually embraced the cold. There was a particular practice, or ceremony, of deliberately ‘hardening’ or training the body that seems to have been common among some northern European tribes. The Romans famously noted the Teuton or Germanic habit of cold-dipping their children and babies into streams; and something of a similar sort occurred among the people of the isolated Lofoten peninsula off northern Norway, in a ceremony observed by the Italian mariner Pietro Querini, in 1432. The round wooden houses of ‘these beautiful and immaculate people’, as he called them, ‘have only one opening to the light, up in the middle of the arch of the roof… They take their new-born when they are four days old and place them naked under the peephole, remove the fish skin and let the snow fall on them to get the children used to the cold.’65
Modern cultural sociologists rightly describe the human body as an ‘unfinished body’—a body created by nature but finished by humans—and, by following this line, have rediscovered all sorts of different ‘social’ bodies (gendered, emotional, regulated, dominant, reproductive, economic, civilized, consuming, narcissistic) with human culture imprinted firmly all over them. This would be an excellent description of the Late Neolithic body—except that it is usually applied to ‘modern’ bodies only. But human evolution may not be the one-dimensional, one-way process we usually take for granted. Humans are highly adaptive, and we often see comfortably bred urban populations reverting to ‘prehistoric’ practices and levels of awareness whenever there is a technical breakdown (just as other populations can rapidly learn to wear clothing, handle cars, or surf the Internet).66 The idea of the ‘unfinished body’ should perhaps also be seen as a very old and self-regarding, or self-conscious, species theory. Back in the Neolithic the word ‘naked’ was presumably given to people without any bodily adornments, in order to distinguish them from those who had, and certainly by c.3000 BCE personal cleanliness had become an established feature of human society. As Bronze Age societies saw it, the extra ‘polish’ or ‘finish’ given by their grooming and adornments separated them from all other animals, and, as we shall see, they wore them with pride.
