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.
In: 1437
In many tropical and temperate areas, there are an abundance of small, flowing streams that arise from natural springs – places where groundwater comes to the surface, and begins flowing downhill. In most cases, spring water is extremely safe – it has been filtered by the soil it has moved through.
Early humans would have definitely noticed that this spring water – and the fast flowing water downstream – tasted much better than pond or lake water, so they would have sought out these natural springs.
In areas lacking natural springs, human dug wells (at least 7000 years ago, maybe earlier). A well is just sort of a man-made spring, a hole deep enough that safe-to-drink groundwater seeps into it. There’s groundwater available pretty much everywhere except deserts and other truly arid (dry) places, although sometimes it’s pretty deep.
Humans get creative. Plants in the curcurbitacea family were selectively bred by certain African cultures to give us the watermelon – and in some primitive cultures, they would raise large quantities of melons, and store them buried in sand in a shady spot, enough water to get them through the dry season.
Then there’s the human immune system. Low level exposure to potentially dangerous microbes primes our bodies to fight those microbes, so someone who grew up drinking water with low levels of bacteria would have an immune system that was very good at making us tolerant of that water. As a young adult I used to backpack and camp in a nearby National Forest, and I would routinely drink of the flowing streams in the area without any treatment – and never felt any ill effects. Now, several decades later of not being exposed to that water, I don’t think I would risk it.
Latest Answers