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
You build up an immunity of sorts to the pathogens that make you ill. When i lived in the jungle, we would drink river water and a lot of people get sick their first time but, after that you dont really get sick
Prehistoric humans probably could drink from pretty gross water and not get sick.
Moving water or water in a stream or river is typically safer than water that’s been sitting around growing bacteria.
Once we got to the point where we could dig a well the aquifers that exist are natural filtration system for water so well water is typically safe to drink
Having said that I’m sure a fair number of humans over the entire span of human history have gotten sick and or died from drinking gross water
As others have said the risk is higher to our modern safety standards but I’d like to add that people nowadays have more probability to get sick from drinking untreated water due to worse and less prepared gut flora.
Plus that was a reason for an higher alcohol consumption, if you add wine to your water to reach 1-2% alcohol plus tannins and acid you get rid of most micro-organism.
Mostly this is a matter of CAN get sick vs will get sick. There’s a chance that drinking from a stream, river or lake will make you sick on any given time. But most of those sickness aren’t life threatening and the ones that did didn’t kill enough to stop humans from reproducing in sufficient numbers.
We also have the ability to recognize non visible factors, like this specific water causes bad sickness, don’t drink it. And we communicate it to other members of our species effectively.
My grandma took me to get water from a spring a few times (Scandinavia). Also people still drink water from wells. There are safe sources for water and I guess people would settle in areas where finding fresh water was possible and relatively easy.
Drinking unpurified water in wilderness is a sure recipe to getting parasites, if not the first time, then sooner or later, and most wild animals indeed have infections of flatworms, etc. And yes, it does often result in death and certainly in reduced life expectancy.
But that is why humans in pre-modern times had 6-8 children per woman, on average! Without resulting in a runaway population boom. Most simply didn’t make it for one reason or other.
Modern humans are in a way exceptional in that a newborn can reasonably expect to die of old age. That’s not really the case for most animals. If in the wild they live long enough to procreate without anything making lunch of them, they have already done better than most of their litter.
After man learned how to make alcohol based drinks ( wine, beer, spirits ) life spans improved a bit. Bacteria cannot survive in it. Which may be the reason it’s so prevalent in old texts. Alcohol may be bad for you, but whatever is up stream from you could kill you
>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.
>…how did so many generations of humans survive without the water purification standards that we have today?
the populations were never what we have today. they didn’t dump massive amounts of nitrogen from artificial fertilizer like we do today. industrial waste wasn’t as much of a problem in the past as it is today.
running water was their purification system and it works really well if you aren’t downstream from an industrial plant.
there are complications too: dysentery was rather common before sewers were invented but protecting people from those issues may have also created some waves of polio that swept the U.S. because people no longer got immunity from the antibodies that developed from exposure.
In addition to the other comments explaining specific waterborne threats, I will add that diseases and their host are, by necessity, in equilibrium.
If a disease (in this case, waterborne) becomes too lethal it will wipe out a population or force that population to adapt which will eliminate its ability to spread. Evolution pushes disease to be effective enough to spread but not too effective that they are wiped out.
When you are talking specifically about waterborne threats, they are almost always caused by human waste entering waterways (a result of the parasitic cycle of growing in a human host and then getting dumped back into the water supply). Humans very long ago evolved to know not to contaminate waterways by defecating away from their water source. As humans have taken over the world, however, overcrowding has become a huge issue in many areas which has led to it being impossible to gather and dispose of human waste effectively so it has naturally overflowed back into water sources. In this way, waterborne diseases are actually a check against overpopulation and another example where diseases and humans achieve a state of equilibrium.
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