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

It really depends on when you are talking about. If you are talking about neolithic humans we survived like any animal survived. Nature is riddled with parasites. It’s not a comfy living but it’s a living. We likely suffered from wide spread parasites and got frequently sick and just toughed it out because you had to survive. Humans would be smart enough to prefer running water over still water and stuff but at the end of the day we just have a much higher standard for what the basics are now. This level of comfort and health simply did not exist back then.

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