This episode is presented by eBay.

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deals on things you love. You can't help but say when it's eBay. It excludes vehicles and business

sellers. Welcome to Scientific Americans

Science Talk posted on January 12th, 2016. I'm Steve Merski. On this episode, there was

surprisingly no drop in intestinal parasite infections during Roman period compared with the previous period where you didn't have any

toilets. That was really surprising. That's Pierce Mitchell. He's in the Department of

Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He studies the interactions

between humans and parasites during evolution, as well as parasites in past civilizations

and how they have affected human health.

He's the author of the 2015 book Sanitation, Latrines, and Intestinal Parasites in Past Populations,

and he's just published a paper in the journal Parasitology titled Human Parasites in the Roman

World, Health Consequences of Conquering an Empire.

Evolution, Parasites, and Ancient Rome are all favorite subjects of mine,

so as soon as I saw the title of the paper, I got in touch with Mitchell,

I asked him to talk about the research and its counterintuitive findings.

He sent me a five-minute voice recording via email.

I was originally planning to pull a

quote or two for our shorter podcast, 60 Second Science, but his entire mini lecture is so good I decided

to just play it all for you straight through. Here's Pierce Mitchell. So the Romans were very

...