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
Most waterborne sicknesses won’t kill you. They’re just unpleasant.
There are some differences in the actual safety of drinking water over time, but it’s mostly actually just a difference of what’s “normal”.
Modern humans generally consider a 1% death rate to be concerning, and a 5% death rate to be threatening. For most of human history, however, a 1% death rate would barely even be noticed.
A modern human considers the death of a child to be a remarkable tragedy. For most of history, nearly *every single family* experienced that. On average, around half of humans died before getting out of puberty – with a significant portion of that being in the infant stage.
In general, humanity historically just dealt with way more sickness and death than we do. We have our own sets of endemic sicknesses, of course, but we’ve heavily reduced the “external” ones and the new main illnesses are “internal” ones – cancer, obesity, autoimmune issues, mental health.
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