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
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.
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