If you can get sick from drinking most of the water that you encounter, how have humans lived so long?

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

Most water in nature is dangerous to drink when you consider that most water is salt water. For fresh water, if it’s running, it’s often safe. Nature also has a few natural filtration methods. Rain water is usually safe to drink and there are places where it rains frequently. A lot of modern water pollution comes from civilization – whether that’s crowded cities using waterways as sewage dumping grounds, or farms having spillage, or companies dumping their waste in places that drain into water sources.

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