alt Hacker NewsI don't really get your point. Water isn't necessarily safe now, either. Just like now, you boil water if you are aware of risk. Just like now, people communicated about when to boil, where to gather water, skinning people alive for messing with the water (well that has perhaps improved a little bit), militaries would regularly poison water sources. And of course, you can find people today who willingly take dumb risks for no explicable reason. All of your uncertainty applies just as much to today as it did in the past.
Water has always been, is, and will be uncertain. But there's so much evidence of awareness of this that speculating people didn't drink water is absurd. Not to mention keeping water sources clean gets much harder with high populations we see today—we have roughly the same amount of water that we did before
Btw, you casually ACCEPTED that people drank beer instead of water when we know this is false. Even on ships (as you would know if you clicked through the askhistorians link under the top of the thread) ships did carry (a lot of!) water—it just wasn't listed as rationed unless supplies ran low. This was both drunk directly and added to the beer to produce the gallon allocated.
Ie you might follow the same rhetorical technique to say "why do you beat your wife? Well, the evidence is uncertain.", even if we have clear evidence you don't beat your wife.
You'd really have to find evidence that people explicitly avoided water to make such a claim. In all situations I can think of there was either certainty it was not potable (ie seawater, poisoned well, flooding, etc) and being unable to boil it.
> Just like now, you boil water if you are aware of risk.
People didn't do that, though. As far as I can tell, water-drinking was not particularly common. People went to surprising lengths to produce other forms of drinks, all of them fermented in some way.
> All of your uncertainty applies just as much to today as it did in the past.
What on earth do you mean by that? Today you have clean water from taps all over your house. In the old days, clean water was rare, and you had to carry it home. If you were lucky you could use a wagon, but it was still hard work.
I mean, yes, of course there was risk then and risk now, but the risk was orders of magnitude higher in the past.
> Btw, you casually ACCEPTED that people drank beer instead of water when we know this is false.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. I've worked on this for a decade, collecting archive accounts from around Europe. I can quote you pages and pages and pages and pages of people writing about how they used to drink beer against thirst every day. Read [my book](https://www.brewerspublications.com/products/historical-brew...) for more.
> Even on ships (as you would know if you clicked through the askhistorians link under the top of the thread) ships did carry (a lot of!) water
Buy a subscription to Craft Beer & Brewing and read my article on [skibsøl](https://beerandbrewing.com/skibsol-smoky-ale-of-the-seas/) the Danish style of beer created expressly for the purpose of being drunk by sailors. It starts with the story of the gov't commission created to investigate improving the sailors' beer after the Battle of Køge Bay.
> You'd really have to find evidence that people explicitly avoided water to make such a claim.
I don't claim that people explicitly avoided water, because the evidence is thin and ambiguous. (Seriously, read the comment you replied to!) What I do claim is that people did drink lots of beer for thirst in various contexts (listing exactly which would make this too long). Exactly why they did is not clear, but we do know people thought beer was healthy. Probably they thought it was healthy because it has lots of calories. (This was a time when getting enough to eat was a challenge for large parts of the population.)
> being unable to boil it.
Again, people didn't do that. You don't need to go back very far in time before people didn't have easy access to metal containers to boil in. Long story, [this chapter explains](https://press.nordicopenaccess.no/cdf/catalog/view/238/1292/...).