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
“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.
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