re: #234 prononymous

I think this misses quite a lot of human history. For much of european history, for example, most people drank beer not water. Even children were given dilute beer. The reason is that the drinking water wasn’t safe at all, less so than drinking swamp water, because they didn’t have proper sanitation.

True, but we must have been drinking something until we learned brewing technology—and I’m willing to bet that was quite a big chunk of human history overall.