alt Hacker NewsAgain, 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.
> the claim is not against people drinking beer or water, it is against doing so out of some general fear of drinking water.
Okay, if that's the claim I would say the state of research at the moment is not 100% clear. It's quite possible that it's not why people did it.
> Perhaps I was too strident in my criticism of your substantial comments; I apologize.
Accepted!
> If water was generally regarded as less safe than beer, why were so many people brutally executed for messing with it?
Good question. One answer might be: because some people were forced to drink it even though it was unsafe, so making it even more unsafe was considered criminal. It's worth looking into, though.
> Surely it is not a coincidence that springs whose water you didn't need to boil later grew towns and cities?
I wonder how that worked out -- once there's a town around it the spring must become less safe. Do you have references on this? Doesn't need to be scholarly, just something specific.
> 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?
You can get diseases from food that's not properly washed, from your hands, etc. Many diseases also are transmitted via lice etc.
My claim is not that people never drank water. We know they did. But we also know they tried to stick to better things when they could. An army on the march is a classic case of people who would have a hard time consistently getting alcoholic drink because of poor logistics. So you'd expect at least parts of the army to be forced to drinking substandard stuff quite often.
> Perhaps there is room for degree of safety that might explain how water can both be safe and unsafe.
Oh, there absolutely is. What's more, people knew there were differing degrees of safety. Linné says exactly that in his 1749 pamphlet on beer (quoted in my blog post). Max Nelson also has a paper discussing how people made these distinctions in antiquity.
> My concern is [...] with the widespread impression that people in the past simply didn't drink water.
We're in agreement on that. They did drink water. They also very clearly preferred not to, but were often forced to. Why did they prefer not to? Not clear. Was the water unsafe? Yes. At least quite a lot of it. Did they know that? To some extent they clearly did. In summary form, that's basically as far as I've gotten.