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
I’m not an expert, but natural selection probably paid a part. Those early humans who could surprise those conditions reproduced. Those who did not survive, those genes were not passed on.
We created alcohol. Much easier to keep potable. And by consequence most historical figures were half wasted most of the time…
Early humans would have had a very low population density as hunter gatherers and pollution such as sewage and agricultural runoff would not have been an issue. Could people have gotten sick from accidentally drinking water contaminated with germs? Absolutely, but it would be much less likely than today. When humans started settling down in groups and founding villages and so on, polluted water became a much bigger issue. Beer came along with the invention of agriculture and served two purposes. The process of making beer and the alcohol content served to purify and preserve the water, and also as a way to preserve calories and nutrition from grain. As villages grew into cities, the problems that come with polluted water increased. Sewers were invented to control pollution and runoff, and helped. But diseases like cholera were common. Most pre-industrial revolution water pollution issues were related to large populations of people living close together and basically shitting in the drinking water. But water in rural areas was still pretty safe. Post-industrial revolution, and the reason why more water is dangerous to drink today, water became polluted with agricultural runoff, mining chemicals, and other hazards of industry, affecting even water in rural areas.
So, for most of human history, untreated water from a good source was not dangerous to drink.
Part of it is just that you got used to the water. I have a friend who’s parents moved from India to the US before they had him. Whenever they go back to visit his parents can have the local water and be fine, they developed drinking it. He on the other hand cannot, it makes him quite sick
In many tropical and temperate areas, there are an abundance of small, flowing streams that arise from natural springs – places where groundwater comes to the surface, and begins flowing downhill. In most cases, spring water is extremely safe – it has been filtered by the soil it has moved through.
Early humans would have definitely noticed that this spring water – and the fast flowing water downstream – tasted much better than pond or lake water, so they would have sought out these natural springs.
In areas lacking natural springs, human dug wells (at least 7000 years ago, maybe earlier). A well is just sort of a man-made spring, a hole deep enough that safe-to-drink groundwater seeps into it. There’s groundwater available pretty much everywhere except deserts and other truly arid (dry) places, although sometimes it’s pretty deep.
Humans get creative. Plants in the curcurbitacea family were selectively bred by certain African cultures to give us the watermelon – and in some primitive cultures, they would raise large quantities of melons, and store them buried in sand in a shady spot, enough water to get them through the dry season.
Then there’s the human immune system. Low level exposure to potentially dangerous microbes primes our bodies to fight those microbes, so someone who grew up drinking water with low levels of bacteria would have an immune system that was very good at making us tolerant of that water. As a young adult I used to backpack and camp in a nearby National Forest, and I would routinely drink of the flowing streams in the area without any treatment – and never felt any ill effects. Now, several decades later of not being exposed to that water, I don’t think I would risk it.
This is why, for a lot of human history, we were all slightly drunk all the time. Alcohol kills germs. So watered down wine, beer, and cider were mainstays even for children. You drank milk until you were 5 and then switched to booze. You’ll notice that China had their sh1t together a lot before Europe did? Well, China drank boiled tea, so they had caffeine instead of booze. And the Enlightenment in Europe coming around the time that Europe started drinking tea too? Not a coincidence.
1. Throughout history a great many humans have died of diseases that are rare today, and many more have lived with chronic ailments contracted from drinking water.
2. Prehistoric humans did not live in cities; early cities were massive breeding grounds for disease, both because of the concentration of people that let diseases spread quickly once established and because sanitation standards were low by modern standards. (Even in modern slums with very low sanitary standards people know to take what precautions they can.)
3. While waterborne parasites can be in even the cleanest looking water, the most dangerous water to drink is from human-polluted or human-distrurbed waters.
because its a numbers game. humans that you see are decendents of the ones that did not die mostly, this is relevant through out time with almost anything u can pin point. basically, lets say you had 10 ppl, 8 of them died with various causes, 2 of them survived. those who lived, both learned to not do what the 8 did, and they thought what they did to their children and repeated. the habits were distilled and passed to offsprings.
The water did often have nasty bugs in it. People often needed to have 5 or 6 children to get two surviving to adulthood. That said people also usually traveled much less and for shorter distances. Odds are, unless you lived in a city, by the time you grew up you were immune to the bacteria in the water near your home. Bad epidemics mostly happened in cities, especially those with foreign traders visiting.
Built up immunities of the local population. It’s like.drinking water in rural Mexico. Locals can drink it, but if you do it as an American on vacation, you can get the runs.
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