Humans sweat. It is one of our superpowers and enables endurance hunting. Anthropologists theorize that early humans would have had to have developed water carrying technologies for this to be viable. They study primitive hunter gathers who still practice endurance hunting and they use water skins during the hunt.

Everyone has sippy bottles now but when I was young in the late 70s we played out all day and did not drink for 7 hours at a time and no one died. Alright one person died but mainly not.

For the most part, yes, at least on a large scale. Proximity to a water source was pretty much a requirement for developments for most of history.

On the smaller side of things, other commenters have already mentioned that we had ways to store water before bottles existed.

Going backwards in time, they had metal and brass containers, before that they had wooden buckets and barrels, ceramic pots, carved out animal parts or fruit of plants.

Before farming, probably a good portion of the water early people subsisted on was from the food they ate. (Berries and fruit, fish, meat, etc.) Water might pool around rocky areas after rain, even if there was no stream nearby in a pinch.

For the most part, yes. That is why they tended to congregate around water sources. Even early settlements and towns and cities were near waters sources even after we had portable water containers because water is heavy and large numbers of people need a large water source.

But before we changed the environment significantly, there were a lot more potable water sources. More streams, more water pooled up after rains, etc. that could be ingested because of a lack of human pollution. If humans were within a days walking distance of a water source, they could do their hunting and gathering nearby and drink up afterwards.

Pretty much yes. If you look at a map, you’ll notice that most cities, especially old (like old old) ones are next to or near water sources. There are, of course, other reasons for this as well: building a settlement by water will also give you the opportunity to use boats, for transportation and shipping. Merchant cities tend to be by seas and oceans, because transporting cargo by ships is much more efficient than by land, especially before airplanes. Then there’s fishing, crop irrigation, and just that humans like bodies of water.

But also, what do you exactly mean by water bottle? Because water transportation and storage vessels have been around for quite a while, and aqueducts have been built by various civilisations across history.

The answer should be fairly obvious to anyone who’s looked at an European map, there’s a reason why the oldest cities are always around or near rivers. Also humans had bottle-like technologies since essentially forever, it’s probably one of the first tools to be developed after “pointy stick”.

Really?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterskin

Also, there was an ice age. Not everyone lives in scorching climates. Theres fresh water around me 247/365. As waterskins are somewhat recent probably, in terms of evolutionary history.

Pots

Dehydration is but a secondary concern as you’re being chased by a sabertooth tiger.

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We had water bottles way before plastic… we used wood, mud, clay, stone, and animal parts to store water before recorded history…

TiL that I’m early human. 1970s baby, but early human

getting water used to be a daily chore. ever hear that song “jack and jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water?” or see the old kung fu movies where they train running water up staircases?

You know the smell dirt makes when its wet? It’s called petrichor and humans can smell it better than sharks smell blood in the water. It is detectable by the human nose at 0.4 parts per BILLION. This gave early humans a huge advantage in finding water when needed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrichor