Shampoo: Setting the Record Straight

     Have you ever questioned the origin of soap? One would think something that plays such a quotidian role in our lives, like soap does, would have more thought given to where it comes from. And yet as a history professor, I find the lack of information on this topic very abysmal.

 

     Indeed, it may be the extreme erroneousness of the historical fact shrouding it, as opposed to a lack thereof, that really irks me. Despite my teaching Paleoanthropological Studies at the University of California, Berkeley for three decades now, it still never ceases to amaze me how many undergraduates do not know the true origin of soap. Many of them subscribe to the typical layman's belief - that soap making started with the Babylonians in 2800 B.C., and that these Akkadian-speaking people were the first to master this art. While it is not incorrect that the Babylonians were very skilled at the creation of castile, they were in no way the first to utilize soap.

 

     Back all those years ago, when I was a young woman working on my thesis (The Sanitation Regimens of Neanderthals - Jane Pollack, 1986), I found some very interesting journals reporting cave drawings that depicted Neanderthal men and women washing themselves in rivers. What's more, they showed the Neanderthals rubbing a special substance, encased in pockets they fashioned out of leaves, on their bodies before entering the river to bathe. Now, this rather puzzled me at the time, as the majority of the American historical community held the origin of soap to be Babylonian. And while I did have some doubts then, the next find I made both shocked me and confirmed my suspicions.

     Africa, the home of our Neanderthal ancestors, was also home to a host of other animal species that have now become extinct. To this day, the scientific community is still not entirely certain of all the animals that existed then - since we only glean what we know through examining fossils. New animals are being discovered regularly - and one such animal is what Neanderthals used to call the sheam (pronunciation: /ʃæɱ/). Belonging to the Sphenisciformes order and the Camalidae family, the sheam was an amphibious, herbivorous bird that grew up to 1.7m (male) tall and weighed approximately 150 kg (male). The sheam was flightless, and apart from this had all other characteristics of birds, except that females had scales on their underbellies. It is likely that they were covered in bright yellow and orange plumage. What really sets the sheam apart, however, is that it defecated not just feces, but excess fat as well. This fact is backed by virtually all historical animal scientists, and has good standing in the historical community albeit being fairly recent.

     After extensive research and carefully sifting through hundreds of scholarly journals, I have come to the conclusion that this substance - the excess fat excrement of the sheam, was used by Neanderthals to cleanse their bodies. Modern soap is, after all, simply a processed concoction of animal/vegetable fat, and the excrement of the sheam was essentially a severely abstracted version of this. While we will never know who exactly it was that discovered this fantastic use of sheam lipids, the Neanderthals did leave us with a word very widely recognized today - sheam-poo. At a time when language was at its most coarse, the word 'poo' referred to excrement, or feces. Etymologically, it arose from the sound most Neanderthals made when coming across normal defecation - the classic 'pooh!' of disgust. Fortunately, one amongst them recognized the cleansing properties of the sheam's feces, resulting in ancient humans using 'shampoo' for the first time ever. Indeed the word 'soap' is a contraction of 'shampoo' - as it gradually became 'shamp', 'shaomp', and finally 'shaop' or 'soap' as we know it today.

     So the next time you take a shower, please bear the correct history of soap in mind. The Neanderthals do not receive enough recognition for the path they paved for future human growth, and we can start giving credit where it is due by acknowledging the progressive steps, such as this one, that our ancestors made.

Dr. Jane Pollack is a professor of Paleoanthropological Science at the University of California, Berkeley. The extensive research she has conducted in this field places her as one of the leading paleoanthropologists of our time. She lives in California with her husband and two dogs.


SOURCES:
-http://www.cleaninginstitute.org/clean_living/soaps__detergent_history.aspx
-http://www.soaphistory.net/
-http://canadianarchaeology.com/caa/publications/canadian-journal-archaeology/37/1
-http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/humans/humankind/n.html
-http://www.livescience.com/7380-chatty-cave-men-neanderthal-talk-good.html
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llama
-http://birding.about.com/od/Bird-Trivia/a/What-Is-A-Bird.htm
-http://www.millersoap.com/soapanimal.html