how did/do native peoples find safe drinking water? Is water boiled? Or have they built up immunities to funky junk in the water?
In: Biology
A bit of both.
*Generally* clear, moving water is going to be safe to drink.
Boiling and filtering water was also very common.
And your immune system handles the minor funky bits that might make it through. Now when people moved to different locations where the water might have different pathogens, then it could cause an issue. Traveler’s Diarrhea was a thing even in ancient times.
And of course the unfortunate nature is that many people just died. Diseases like Dysentery were quite common.
River water and water that is filtered through rocks that comes up in springs and wells is healthier than water than has been in a muddy puddle for weeks.
Native Europeans, North Americans, Saudis, Israelis, Japanese and Australians get it out the tap, just like non natives.
Everyone else needs to boil it, drink only bottles water, use chemicals, or try to find a clean source, usually upstream from any settlements.
Many can’t do any of those, and they solve the problem by just… drinking dirty water.
“In the wild”, such as places that have never really been industrialized, a river or a stream is usually safe drinking water.
What makes standing water unsafe is once bacteria and organisms start growing in it it has nowhere to go. So more and more of those organisms stack up until there’s so much there’s no way to drink the water safely.
In running water, the bacteria’s constantly getting moved somewhere else if it starts growing. So it can’t really gather in large numbers. Even for really dangerous diseases, our immune system can handle a tiny bit of the bacteria/virus/organism.
The other danger we’re used to from water “in the wild” is pesticides and other chemical runoff from peoples’ yards, farming, and all the “safe” factories we let dump “treated” water. That doesn’t exist in native places because *generally* they are remote and *generally* we don’t set up factories to dump chemicals into their water.
They still get sick from water more often than we do. People died a lot younger in ancient times, and a lot more frequently. But they also had a lot more kids since most kids died. So as long as someone didn’t die until they’d had a few kids, it didn’t really matter.
Two responses –
1) Water isn’t really that dangerous to drink straight from a source. Obviously not polluted, fetid, standing water, but even then there are a variety of natural filtration methods you can use. We only worry about it so much when hiking or camping because it’s feasible for us to remove that 1% chance of getting terrible diarrhea. Access to fresh water is also central to where most people settled.
2) Yeah a lot of people just caught dysentery and died. Especially when gathered into large communities like cities, death from water-borne illness was just a lot more common. It’s just not something that kills you every time, and it’s pretty easy to treat water with modern technology, so that’s one death we can prevent.
Chiming in from Finland: springs and certain mountain streams are reliably enough clean that drinking straight out of them is safe to this day. Agricultural runoff from modern day farms is a major factor in making certain rivers unpotable. Even some lakes are safe to drink from, at least for people with relatively robust immune systems.
And as late as my own parent’s childhood years, a considerble proportion of people literally had wells on their yards, another example of natural water being safe when crucial requirements are met.
diarrhea Is the leading cause of human death. Everyone had parasites so consistently some auto immune diseases arise from the body not knowing what to do without parasites, we just were sick all the time forever
Safety is a spectrum and there’s a difference between safe and safe enough. Generally clear running water if taken from the surface is safe enough anywhere there isn’t substantial population in proximity or upstream. General rule of thumb was that flowing water was safe enough and if the water was stagnant or slow moving you needed to boil it first.
There also was a certain level of tolerance built up by using the same drinking source to things that are in it as that doesn’t change all that often unless you have a bunch of people or industry adding things to it.
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