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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When my National Guard squadron flew to Honduras in the 80s for deployment, we were warned not to drink local water when off base. Because it was a small village, the water was deemed non-potable. We were working to build a wall for the small school and we had to bring our own water with us. The medical officer briefed us when we landed, that the majority of the local population had internal parasites. We were told not to accept water or juice, milk, or eat fruits and vegetables. Beer and hot coffee were acceptable.
We just out bred it. Dysentery has over the course of humanity killed billions. It killed entire families, communities, tribes, hell it still kills people. Before IV fluids you had to hope someone was well enough to go find potable water and bring it to you as you dehydrated yourself through every viable orifice until you were too weak to move.
As for boiling water we didn’t know why it worked we just knew it did. It was probably discovered on accident when we boiled something and made soup. There was more likely then not long periods of human history when we thought you had to cook something in water to make it drinkable.
Streams used to be much cleaner to drink from. That changed when people started bringing livestock everywhere, especially cows and goats, their excrement made its way into the waterways. Main risk of drinking untreated water is E. coli and giardia, both of which come from solid waste of animals.
That’s why when you hike up to alpine lakes, where there’s nothing upstream, you can drink straight from the lakes / streams without filtering (not necessarily recommended, but definitely safer than something lower down).
Wells. Well water is filtered by the sand that the water flows through, the water doesn’t need to be boiled. Rural households today don’t have city water and sewers, but wells and septic systems. We use an electric pump to draw water out of the ground instead of a bucket, but it essentially works the same way.
When I was a kid in the ’60s we’d spend most of the summer at my grandfather’s place, where my mum grew up.
He didn’t have electricity or any kind of plumbing. There was a hand pump in the kitchen next to a wood stove and you’d fill the sink or get a drink from that. Unfiltered, and goodness knows how many bugs, mice, etc drowned in that well.
He had an outhouse and cut up newspaper nailed to the wall to wipe with. There was nowhere to wash your hands until you got back to the house and used the kitchen pump, or walked down to the creek. I never even bothered.
Drank the creek water daily playing with my cousins while we explored or fished.
I never got the least bit sick. I’m now in my ’60s and perfectly healthy. My mum, grandfather, grandmother, aunts, uncles, etc. grew up living that way and lived well into their ’90s.
I’m not saying sanitation doesn’t matter, but the shit I read on the internet these days about living a sterile life is worse than any particles of shit that ever got in my food.
We now live in a sterilized world, everything has to be “sanitized for your protection”, every mom carries hand sanitizer and Clorox wipes.
Kids don’t play in the dirt anymore or eat wild raspberries. Every scraped knee is immediately cleaned and bandaged.
This is terrible for us, it kills the natural bacteria on our skin that forms a protective layer, it kills the gut biome that fights off and kills the parasites in the water.
This has been scientifically proven, yes we need to be clean, but we do not want to be sterile.
Play in the dirt. Your kids scrapes a knee let it bleed and crust over, clean it later when they bathe.
Leave the hand sanitizer in the bag at the petting zoo.
It’s okay to eat with unwashed hands.
Places where people invented or started to like to drink beer or tea were accidental havens for humans. We probably drank those drinks because of their deliciously and refreshingly mildly intoxicating addictiveness but accidentally stumbled across something great. When you make beer or tea you boil the water. This kills most nasties in the water. Suddenly people aren’t dying of diarrhoea left right and centre. People start to have time to build instead of struggling with a life of parasites. Civilisation starts.
We figured out boiling pretty quickly, and even before knowing about germs, bacteria, and parasites, we knew that drinking certain types of water makes us sick. Likely in the same way we learned that certain berries are poisonous. It turns out boiling water is extremely effective at making it drinkable, it isn’t perfect but it gets the job done in most cases.
An important thing to note here is: anything that kills humans after birthing age (lets say 35+) wont really affect us from an evolutionary standpoint. So in that regard we are very resilient as a species to toxins and other things that kills slowly overtime.
Also many things from drinking “bad” water makes you sick because you as a traveler are unused to local bacteria. But humans didnt travel that much in prehistory. Even during the great migrations ppl generally lived and died in a very local area. It wasnt some great constant wandering.
Also helps that the average woman had like 5+ children aswell. even with something really high like 25% infant mortality rate the species still propagated.
Just a bare minimum of only drinking moving water makes it much safer for early humans. And overall the water was cleaner back then. You atleast didnt have to worry as much about 8billion other humans throwing refined metals and chemicals in your watersupply.
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