An interesting but sad discovery from Siberia tonight where a Canadian archaeologist has found early skeletal evidence of a twin birth - the earliest known in fact.

Angela Lieverse, a Bio-archeologist from the University of Saskatchewan says exhumed skeletons from a Siberian cemetery of a mother and her twins are around 77-hundred years old ( Read more... )

This has been amusing me tonight - can any mothers vouch for these foetal positions?

The diagrams are taken from a c.1400 manuscript at the Bodleian Library HERE


( Read more... )

This is something completely new to me! Did you know that long before Kinsey an American professor called Clelia Duel Mosher surveyed dozens of women - many of which were born before 1870 - about their most intimate habits? The results were kept secret until the original surveys were found among her papers in the 1970s.

It is the earliest known ( Read more... )

Thank you to brutti_ma_buoni for tonight's entry!

A new study by the Urban Institute into the economy of sex work in US cities has invited comparison with the surveillance of elite prostitutes by the 18th century Paris police.

Trying to understand the underground sex economy, however, is as old as police work itself. One of the very first police forces in the ( Read more... )

An intriguing article from i09!

Preformationism was a popular theory in the 17th and 18th centuries. It allowed people to believe in a clockwork world, where there were tiny people running around in sperm. And those tiny people also had tiny people in their sperm. But there was a peculiar kind of logic to it all ( Read more... )

This must have been one heck of a party o_O

While sifting through a 19th century trash heap buried below Manhattan's City Hall Park, archaeologists found a dirt-caked tube that was finely carved out of bone and had a perforated, threaded screw cap. Only recently did they discover that it was actually a vaginal syringe used for douching.


( Read more... )

Visitors to the Museum of London on Valentine's night will get to see a special exhibition - a set of erotic tiles dating from the 18th century and discovered in a London pub in the 1960s.

Given the subject matter, they have been kept “in the deep, dark depths of the museum’s store ever since,” the curators said ( Read more... )

This is the best thing I have seen so far this year (I know it's only January but I think it will be hard to beat ( Read more... )

These are amazing! Emily Brand (who runs the Bawdyhouse blog I sometimes link to) has found these brilliant euphemisms for sex from the 18th century.

Here are just a few...

LOBCOCK, a large relaxed penis, also a dull inanimate fellow ( Read more... )

I was just reading this article over at The Smithsonian Magazine.

The Curious Case of Nashville's Frail Sisterhood

It tells the eventful story of the time in the 1860s that the city of Nashville tried to expel the majority of its prostitutes, utterly failed, and ended up licensing the trade for a short time instead. An interesting read!