I am not anything close to an ecologist or a biologist so this question may be really dumb. But I know that water is essential. It is used in many important bodily processes and we would die without it very quickly.
So my question is, how did so many generations of humans survive without the water purification standards that we have today?
Is there a reasonable amount of dirt, toxins, bacteria, etc… that can be in water and it won’t make us sick?
I also know people have boiled water for a very long time but didn’t we only discover bacteria and viruses in the lasts several hundred years? Did people know that boiling water would purify it?
Also am I wrong for thinking that most water in nature is dangerous to drink?
Hopefully these questions make sense.
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When I was a kid in the ’60s we’d spend most of the summer at my grandfather’s place, where my mum grew up.
He didn’t have electricity or any kind of plumbing. There was a hand pump in the kitchen next to a wood stove and you’d fill the sink or get a drink from that. Unfiltered, and goodness knows how many bugs, mice, etc drowned in that well.
He had an outhouse and cut up newspaper nailed to the wall to wipe with. There was nowhere to wash your hands until you got back to the house and used the kitchen pump, or walked down to the creek. I never even bothered.
Drank the creek water daily playing with my cousins while we explored or fished.
I never got the least bit sick. I’m now in my ’60s and perfectly healthy. My mum, grandfather, grandmother, aunts, uncles, etc. grew up living that way and lived well into their ’90s.
I’m not saying sanitation doesn’t matter, but the shit I read on the internet these days about living a sterile life is worse than any particles of shit that ever got in my food.
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