Comment by oofManBang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oofManBang | Hacker News Reader

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I 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/...).

> As far as I can tell, water-drinking was not particularly common

Based on what? You certainly haven't given any indication of having read what historians have to say.

Granted, that subreddit could be a cabal of people colluding to make us think humans didn't go through a phase of drinking beer rather than water. It seems easier to believe you're trying to justify your own talking out of your ass if you can't respond to specific claims.

> In the old days, clean water was rare

What does this mean? Clean water was arguably much more common than it is today because of industrial contamination.

> 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).

Nobody contests this. What is contested is fear of drinking water.

> 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.

Great! Pay up! I ain't reading your book.

Btw, you don't need metal to boil water. And beer is healthy if you're faced with a calorie deficit; it's loaded with nutrients. Perhaps you should use this as an argument for why people drank beer (allegedly and confusingly instead of water)

> I don't claim that people explicitly avoided water

Yes you did:

> And was this why people drank beer instead?

If you did not mean to imply that beer drinking came at the deficit of water drinking, you should consider rephrasing.

> 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. One citation might be more meaningful than this entire thread. If you can provide a source, please do so.

Hell, I drink beer for thirst myself; against all rational judgement. This doesn't imply my tap water is unclean.

> 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.

> 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.

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