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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>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?
Yes, this has been known for thousands of years. You don’t need to know about bacteria to observe that those who drink boiled water are much less likely to get sick than those who don’t.
But also, the simple answer is that a lot of people got sick, and many of them died, from all sorts of things. Life used to be pretty brutal. In ancient times, the average woman who survived through her reproductive years had something like nine children. And yet the worldwide population stayed low. The only way for that math to work is if most of those children aren’t living long enough to have their own.
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