alt Hacker News> Based on what? You certainly haven't given any indication of having read what historians have to say.
I am a historian. This is based on 10 years of reading ethnographic archive documentation of what people used to drink on farms, plus of course wide reading of ethnographic and historical literature on this.
> Clean water was arguably much more common than it is today because of industrial contamination.
Industrial contamination is not the issue. The issue is bacteria and other micro-organisms. This page is very good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterborne_disease
This is what toilets used to look like, from a museum in Gotland, Sweden. https://img.garshol.priv.no/photoserv.py?t378684
Now imagine the effect on your well, which usually would be downhill from the houses.
> Nobody contests this. What is contested is fear of drinking water.
Actually, lots of people contest that people used to drink beer, but that's fine. Let's move on.
I agree fear of drinking water is tricky. Evidence on this one way or another is hazy and ambiguous, but it seems to be more a preference for beer. What motivated the preference is again tricky to pin down.
It's easy to come up with quotes showing aversion to water. Just look at the first page of Linné's "A Description of Beer" (actual title in Swedish) from 1749. It says straight out that many kinds of water are harmful and therefore people prefer beer. But it doesn't mean this was a general belief, and there's plenty of evidence the other way.
> Btw, you don't need metal to boil water.
I already linked to a paper on how to boil water without. But it does mean that it was difficult. And people didn't know they needed to. So they didn't.
>> I don't claim that people explicitly avoided water
>Yes you did:
Quote is missing or garbled somehow.
> > 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).
> I have no doubt that someone in history said this, just as they did now; what I find hard to believe is that this was in any way normal or typical.
I think at this point the best thing I can do is point you to this, which is a relatively superficial summary of the evidence as I know it: https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/433.html
Note the map with coloured dots. Every single one of those dots is a primary source where someone describes their own home parish.
The subject deserves a proper paper, but it's going to take a while before I have time to put one together.
That blog post is from 2022. Here's the state of that map today: https://imgur.com/a/K8YmqV7
Note that it was not just common to drink beer every day. French schools served wine with lunch until 1981. https://www.vice.com/fr/article/quand-les-enfants-buvaient-d...
Again, the claim is not against people drinking beer or water, it is against doing so out of some general fear of drinking water.
Perhaps I was too strident in my criticism of your substantial comments; I apologize.
However, I am still unconvinced that people in the past viewed beer as a replacement for potable water rather than a food-like complement to it. If water was generally regarded as less safe than beer, why were so many people brutally executed for messing with it? Why do we have so many sources noting with far more sensitivity than most have today to where you can find and drink water without boiling? Surely it is not a coincidence that springs whose water you didn't need to boil later grew towns and cities? Why do we have so much evidence of what amounts to seasonal boil advisories? Why was disease so strongly associated with the presence of armies if people weren't consuming the water that forms the natural vector for transmission?
I have no doubt the confidence to which we can say water was safe could be exaggerate in order to dispel the myth that people didn't generally drink water at all, but even today people drink from water sources that would make you or I sick without becoming ill themselves. Perhaps there is room for degree of safety that might explain how water can both be safe and unsafe.
My concern is not with doubt in the consumption of beer (or wine, or later liquor) but with the widespread impression that people in the past simply didn't drink water. Such a poor understanding of what you clearly understand is a complicated topic harms our ability to empathize with our ancestors.