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> If you want safe water, all you have to do is boil it.

All we have to do is boil it, because we have a germ theory. If i'd been drinking from the same well for 30 years, I don't think I'd make the connection that the water was somehow bad unless it tasted funny or was cloudy.

However, if i acquire a taste for tea, a good fraction of my water is automatically purified.

Alcohol, of course, is a nice way to store those hard grown calories. Grapes don't last long, wheat gets infested with bugs and rats. Beer and wine keep for a while. And of course, also purified.

Archaic doesn't mean stupid. We are all lucky John Snow was so diligent. That was a tough connection to make. And of course, once it was discovered, people regularly boil water when there are issues with the local water supply.

We got kind of lucky by getting addicted to things that inadvertently had unknown positive effects. Which, in my humble, non immunologist or doctor kind of way, probably outweighed the really terrible negative effects of long term massive alcohol consumption.

Did anyone live long enough to die of long term massive alcohol consumption?

i think average lifespan was historically low because of infant mortality, and childhood deaths. If you made it to 20, you had good odds of making it to 60. Socrates was like 70. In order to die of something like that, you'd have to be pretty darn wealthy, i'd think. First, rich enough to survive childhood, and then rich enough to drink a lot.

Yes. It's a misunderstanding of the life expectancy metric to believe people lives were short. Actually if you made it into adulthood chances are you would live and grow old.

The short life expectancy is due to a high risk of death as a baby or child.

Seems life expectancy of 70 years was considered normal a couple thousand years ago: https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Psalms-90-10/

Edit: never thought I'd be quoting the bible here as evidence of something

All this in addition to the logistics of simply boiling some water compared to the wine and beer.

Water was a somewhat precious resource for most folks. You either fetched it from the well or from the source plus have a fire to heat the water over - a fire that you aren't going to need for that day's food. Not to mention that you might need to do this for your family of 6 and doing the rest of your chores - all of which took much more work than today.

the beer or wine would have likely been delivered by horse and wagon if one purchased it. Otherwise, it likely would have been produced and stored on-site - the fetching would have been a bit different.

Also this neglects the fact that beer was a way to store water. If you simply boil water and store it in a clay pot someplace, it is possible for it to become infected again due to the container having small openings. Beer solved this problem allowing for transportable, safe, ready to drink fluids.

> Water was a somewhat precious resource for most folks.

Again, this is not true. Water only became a scarce resource for some when population density reached a certain point.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yts0v/comme...

> If you want safe water, all you have to do is boil it.

That's not necessarily true. Boiling will protect you from ingesting live parasites or bacteria, but it will not protect you from potential toxins that might have been produced by the bacteria. It will not protect you from pollutions like heavy metals either, but neither will alcohol.

Alcohol would have the advantage over boiling water that the bacteria would not be in the alcohol in the first place so they could not have produced something bad for you in the water. Also, as someone else pointed out, if you don't understand why some water makes you sick, and don't understand how to treat the water to keep it safe, how are you gonna start boiling water? Does it give you something beneficial apart from the not yet made connection of safety? no.

What gives alcohol the big advantage here is that the safety-thing is a side-effect. People drank because they liked it, and the hypothesis is they also gained better survival because it happened to have antiseptic features as well.

> Alcohol would have the advantage over boiling water that the bacteria would not be in the alcohol in the first place so they could not have produced something bad for you in the water.

This might hold for liquor (depending on what destillation removes and retains), but 90-95% of beer is boiled water and the bacteria would most definitely have been in there in the first place.

I actually enjoy brewing beer in my spare time. You're right in that it is a lot of water in beer, but if you had a contamination of bacteria in an early batch you would get the problem of the bacteria competing with the yeast. If the contamination is introduced after a certain point of fermentation, newly introduced bacteria would no longer get a hold because of the alcohol levels.

So in short, you are correct in that if you start brewing with contaminated water you will get the same problem in the end product.

> "People drank alcohol because it was safer than water". If you want safe water, all you have to do is boil it. A lot simpler than beer brewing.

Easy to say when you know about germ theory.

> The coffee houses developed in parallel with the beer houses, not instead of them. We recently had an article on HN that made the point that alcohol consumption actually increased in the 19th century.

The usage was very different though wasn't it? With beer halls people weren't drinking when they were working, they were drinking after work.

> Easy to say when you know about germ theory.

You don't need to be a weatherman to go out and look at the weather.

But you do need a microscope to look at germs.

India has had civilization for as long as anybody and drinking was prohibited in the culture, or at least not encouraged. So these are just generalized stories created from history they have no basis to make a grandiose claim that a tool created civilization, a tool is a tool it allows you do solve certain problems, there are different tools that solve the same problems for instance boiling. There are other stimulants than caffeine. Nothing substantial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_water_filters#Ancie...

Citation needed for "drinking was prohibited in the culture".

Local varieties of alcohol are plentiful across the country, and not limited to just palm wine. There are more than enough references to alcohol in ancient literature, not all of them condemnatory in nature.

Much of the prohibition movement happened around the time of the struggle for Independence from British Rule. For example, search for "kallu kadai mariyal" (Tamil, literally, blockading a toddy shop).

https://www.quora.com/What-does-Hinduism-say-about-consuming...

In the Mahabharata, Shukracharya due to his alcoholism caused Kacha to be killed, ground up and mixed in his alcohol by the Asuras. After going through an ordeal of having to teach Kacha the secret Sanjivani knowledge, Shukracharya came to his senses, and pronounced these sayings on drinking:

यो ब्राह्मणो अद्य प्रभृतीह कश्चिन्मोहात्सुरां पास्यति मन्दबुद्धिः।

अपेतधर्मो ब्रह्महा चैव स स्यादस्मिँल्लोके गर्हितः स्यात्परे च ॥

“Whoever foolish brahmana henceforth drinks alcohol out of delusion, he should be considered as devoid of dharma, a killer of brahmanas, and should be forever despised in this world and the next.”

This is as far as Brahmins are concerned. However, since Vedic times there have been special yajnas for Kshatriyas where drinking is done in a restricted way so as to allow them to indulge in their vices but in a controlled way. I believe the yajna in which drinking is allowed is either Rajasuya or Sautramani.

The Dharma shastras (law books) by default condemn alcoholism for any person regardless of occupation. However, in consideration of physical exertion and exhaustion of Kshatriyas and Shudras, alcohol is allowed for them to bring some relaxation and relief of pain.

"are they planning to bring Prohibition back now?"

Prohibition never ended, it just switched to targets with less public sympathy.

War on a drugs, esp. On Cannabis, is a good example of prohibition with the crime it generates.

Indeed. We've just changed it to the war on (some) drugs (when consumed by certain people).

> If you want safe water, all you have to do is boil it.

I think the problem is that you can't store a barrel of water in the cellar for months. But you can do it with wine (and water it down with fresh water).

Why would want to store a barrel of water when you're a pastoral nomad or when your settlement it close to several fresh water sources ?

> If you want safe water, all you have to do is boil it. A lot simpler than beer brewing

Err no. You brew it and store it and it remains fine. You then need to store it cleanly for a period. Not to mention then the mechanism of contamination was unknown.

Boiling water is difficult when you're gathering your own firewood and may not have metal bowls.

- "People drank alcohol because it was safer than water"

This has literally never been proven to be true. Just one of the myths invented recently.

It's interesting that you use quotes that don't appear in the text, because if passing those messages was the intention of the writer they succeeded beautifully.

If I recall, gin was the crack/meth of its day, in the 18th century. As immortalized in Hogarth's Gin Lane.

Given that the Cato institute is strongly in favor of legalization, I doubt they want to ban alcohol.