Eli5 How did travelers/crusaders in medieval times get a clean and consistent source of water
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Homo sapiens is a species that is ok to defecate where it lives.
Early humans used fermentation (ie beer) to purify their drinking water, although they probably didn’t know why it purified the water, and those who didn’t drink beer probably didn’t realise the health benefits of drinking purified water (via fermentation, which killed bacterium)
The discovery of coffee (and tea? – circa 1600’s), which involves boiling water, purified the water, but again – people who drank coffee didn’t realise at the time that was one of the reasons that they lived a longer life than non -coffee drinkers, because an understanding of microbes and bacteria was some centuries away.
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