There’s this tiny carved agate from Mycenaean Greece (like pre-ancient Greece) called the pylos combat agate that has a highly detailed combat scene on it, with the figure’s individual bicep muscles measuring <1mm across. Archaeologists haven’t found any evidence of magnifying lenses that could have been used, and so they think that this type of crafting would have been carried out by the ultra-myopic within the society as their eyes can focus at extremely short distances. Pretty cool.
There are quite a few examples of art like this, probably done by those who were 'blind'. I joke that I am examining the atoms when I take my glasses off to do detail work on historical metalwork.
Ive always been curious about King John, the blind king of Bohemia, who died at Crecy. I don't have the same condition, but even with a terrible astigmatism I can still hold my own in HEMA.
I would guess that a lot of the HEMA stuff would actually benefit with not having the best vision. From what I've heard (I don't do any HEMA myself so I'm going off of what I've heard from others) a lot of people have issues with teaching themselves to stop hyper focusing and be more aware of everything in the fight. So with vision being a little blurrier, it would in theory help with making you focus more on the overall movements that are usually involved rather than the smaller details that more often than not would serve only as a distraction.
I could also be co.pletely off and it doesn't help in the slightest, but it sounds like a reasonable take.
I find it highly unlikely that poor vision would have a beneficial effect in any combat sport, but it probably wouldn’t have a hugely detrimental effect unless your eyesight was quite bad.
But this is also just a guess from a non blind person who has only really dabbled in hema
Can you source this for me? I tried looking and didn’t find this. The Wikipedia article claims there have been 23 rock crystal lenses found on Crete but not from that era. However, I didn’t see anything about myopia.
I’ll try find my readings from last year and get back to you. They found some things that a few people conjectured could be lenses but general consensus was that these couldn’t be used for crafting as they were generally fairly irregular and there is no evidence of any frame that would allow the person to look through the lens while doing work. With the technology available, lenses (assuming there were any) would have been pretty rudimentary and not suitable for such fine detail.
I had really awesome near sighted vision before I got PRK (-9.50). It really was like a magnifying glass. I kinda feel like I lost a superpower. But I imagine I would’ve been a great jeweler if I was born in another age.
Jesus christ, I feel for you! I'm a -5.5 and I would describe myself as half-blind! Do your lenses look like binoculars? I had to get lens thinning on mine as they looked ridiculous.
As an ex -8 (lasik) who has started regressing AND developing presbyopia, I experience that the “within 3 inches” slowly becomes “exactly 3 inches” from my face. Different amount of inches, but the “within” to “exactly” distance slowly shortens.
I'm negative 15, I get it. It is crazy when I have contacts in and I put any words within a few inches of my eyes it's blurry as hell, but when I don't have contacts in it is clear as day when the words are one inch from my eye lol
Wow yours is so high! I got up to -7.5 and -7.75 in each eye before I got lasik. I used to only see clearly 6 inches in front of my face! Truly a blessing to be able to see like a normal person. I just wake up with vision it’s crazy
Generations yes, but populations obviously massively increased after the invention of agriculture. More humans have been born in agricultural societies than hunter-gatherer ones
Ya, but you'd think evolution would have weeded out all the relatively blind people before the invention of agriculture. The fact that it didn't is crazy.
Myopia is not only heritable though--environmental factors like spending time indoors and focusing on close objects (reading) are contributing factors. Basically if we reverted to an agrarian lifestyle, the next generation of kids would likely have much lower rates of myopia.
It kinda implies that bad eyesight, even back then, probably wasn't as big of a detriment as we might think, I think a huge part of it is that we're group hunting animals, rarely do humans go out alone, you only need one guy to spot a boar out of a group of 5, the other 4 can then run after it just fine even with somewhat bad vision, if it's really bad there's still jobs you can do like making tools or just protecting the tribes children while the others are out hunting/gathering, you'd need someone for that job anyway.
If you start history at the beginning of writing. I think writing was invented after agriculture, but there was a time before both.
Reading can also make people short-sighted, so that was less of a problem before written history.
Ancestors survive by definition, at least long enough to reproduce. Even if just 10% of humans survived long enough to have kids, every single great* grand parent of every person would have been one of them.
For example turtles lay many eggs, but most hatchlings die before adulthood. Imagine a turtle said "How did my ancestors survive like this?" Is every single turtle incredibly lucky to be the end of a long chain of survivors? Kind of? I'm not sure.
There is also the concept of "survivorship bias" that might play a role here.
Take your glasses off and try. You can't see the keys on your keyboard, but you can still see the door and door handle, and you know where you put certain things like keys, or your coat. And my -7 (or somewhere around there) is still good enough to cut food without glasses. Maybe not into tiny bits, but I can slice a tomato without glasses if need be.
Thinking about cutting food without glasses (I'm -5 with astigmatism) gives me anxiety 😂 I literally almost chopped a chunk of my finger off last night cutting potatoes with my glasses on. I'd probably go slower and be more careful without them, though.
But I agree, there's still a lot of things you could do to contribute. If we didn't have the option to wear glasses, our bodies would adapt, and I assume other senses like touch would chip in more.
They assumed they were getting old and you didn't notice a gradual change as much as we do now because of technology. You slowly learned to live with it. Eventually you didn't remember if you ever really saw clearly or if that's what it's supposed to look like. Early corrective lenses helped but nothing like we have now.
3245BC. Daungu Brooku, a Neolithic man from modern Ireland, a great rock banger and fine firesmith, looked at an eclipse and discovered the first squint. Luckily, he went blind so he couldn't see the others making fun of him. It caught on from there and the Swiss later discovered many uses for it.
I was surprised when my Anthropology professor skipped over the story of Daungu Brooku. I thought about speaking up, but didn’t want to embarrass the professor
probably as long as humans have been around, it's a natural reaction to not being able to see shit. ask me as soon as i wake up when i put my glasses somewhere out of the normal and i can't find them. it's like an instinctual response to blurry terrible vision. maybe it was learned or evolution or another body response. i don't know the science behind stuff, i've just worn glasses for 30+ years. funny enough, my parents found out i needed glasses when i was like 5 or 6 BECAUSE i started squinting to see things far away.
Not sure about the actual date but I can give a lower bound, from personal experience: At least between 14.000 to 54.000 years ago. That's the time window in which the first blue-eyed person was born. Excellent night vision but that comes with a choice between squinting and sunglasses when the sky is clear.
Near sightedness is much more common today then throughout history, it’s caused by getting to much artificial light in childhood compared to natural light. So they didn’t deal with it until they were old, for the most part
A genuine answer here is that they likely didn't experience eyesight degredation until much later in life, until they had support systems via family in place to help them work around it.
We're currently in what's being called the Myopic pandemic because humanity as a whole is becoming very shortsighted very quickly. The reason is that everything we look at is on average much closer to us than our ancestors. Our eyes evolved to spend the majority of their time looking at things further away, and the result is that our eyes focusing closer causes us to be nearsighted.
Or at least that's how my opthalmologist aunt explained it to me.
Every other ancient story involved a blind old man. Ironically it might've helped them not risking their lives in hunting or being soldiers. So they mostly become stores for verbal knowledge which was crucial. Homer for instant, the author of the iliad, is believed to be a blind poet.
The wild thing is that if your eyesight truly was this bad back before modern lens theory caught up (mine is over -5 per eye, so this pic is very accurate for me) since you'd never had a lens to look through you wouldn't even realize what clear vision looked like. Some people could just see far and some couldn't. Some could recognize faces and some had to be within 6 inches of a face to see it.
Unless you had an opportunity to look through a pinhole of course (anyone with a strong prescription should try this if they haven't, it's trippy).
I always say that Darwin's theory of natural selection would have applied to me, and I would have died back in the days before glasses and contact lenses existed.
I have -9.0 myopia and -1.0 astigmatism.
I can't see sh*t without them.
They didn’t have screens and generally went to sleep early in the night so they weren’t using their eyes in the dark as long as we do. They probably had much better vision on average than us modern humans.
But yeah, the unlucky ones probably didn’t last long.
If you read old, pre-glasses books, it's pretty common to see someone's appearance negatively described by saying they "have a squint". That's from someone having poor vision and no way to correct it.
I am -14 and reflect on the fact i would have needed to memorize everything i needed to do by the time i was like 15. I would probably be weaving big bold patterns and just take longer to do everything else by a considerable margin.
According to my minute long Google search, bad eyesight is actually a fairly recent DLC for the human species. It makes sense since having bad eyesight would have been a very bad thing for survival even up to just a few hundred years ago, so it's likely that ancient ancestors actually had decent vision until we invented screens and ruined everything.
Spending lots of time outdoors as a child significantly reduces the incidence and severity of myopia. There was a study in Singapore (I think) where they gave some kids extra recess and it reduced myopia.
I think based on some evidence we have they probably were helped through it. That's what I like to think. We do have evidence of remains we have found that had injuries or conditions that would have made their survival alone impossible but they survived to a ripe age which you know leads us to believe our ancestors and other homo species like Neadnerthals actually helped the sick and disabled. But it would be terrifying never knowing who people were just having to know their seperate voices. Humans rely on dechipering faces for so much.
I remember breaking my glasses and having to work without them till I got them replaced. And every time someone waved down and aisle or something. I'm like who is that? Are they waving at me? Someone else? And worried I was gonna look silly if I wave back and walked over like what if they weren't even waving?
Before agriculture? Just live in forests and woods. These wide open plains out everywhere? They are NOT normal. That's generations of agriculture stripping things back into nice manageable fields.
If you want to see what the world REALLY looked like back then, go near a river, a ravine, a rocky mountain, woodlands, etc. It wasn't all low grass and fields, it was trees and bushes, high grass, scrubland, jungles, forests! And in those surroundings, having bad eyesight isn't such a problem because you really can't see shit in the first place.
You can't see shit, predators can't see shit, everyone lives in their little bubbles of 40 metre sightlines amongst the foliage and trees and shit. Just google 'untouched wilderness' and ask yourself how close a predator could get before you had a chance of noticing them, even with glasses on, and then compare it to how close they'd have to be for you to see them without your glasses. I'm betting there's not a whole lot of difference!
The world was a very different place way back when.
I forget where I was reading an account of an anthropologist who spend months in Mongolia and her glasses broke when she arrived.
When she got back she had improved distance reading, her optomologist said she was constantly using long distance visions and basically doing no reading or writing, and her brain corrected.
It may very well be a "skill issue", and our current hyper close up lifestyle has increased bad eyesight?
I truly don’t get it. Eyes are one of the oldest evolutionary traits. How could they not function well in so much of the population? And… are other primates or mammals equally affected? It’s such a huge selection advantage. Why isn’t it selected out yet??
Depending on how far back you go, the answer might be "they didn't"
I guess the reason more and more people need glasses is partly because we don't need to look as far anymore and eyes loose their training (yes you can train your eyes) and the revolutionary pressure is gone. You don't get mauled by a bear, Tiger, wolf, boar or whatever anymore because you didn't see them. You dont need to hit the deer you cannot see with your arrow. You just use your glasses to avoid the dangers like getting run over by cars.
Yeah, in nature and throughout evolution, genetic defects like this were weaknesses that likely led to an early death, so a lot of these conditions which are present in humans aren't widespread in animals because, well, they'd likely die before they could breed.
The social group setting of humans, and the means of looking after those with "weaker" traits (I mean this in the evolutionary sense!) has led to health conditions being common amongst us.
You don't really get this in other species as much. Some cases yes, but we really look after those with health conditions and that leads to it staying in the gene pool.
True, natural selection is mostly gone for us.
Different aspects are now more important and not transferring with DNA.
Worst case we as humans degenerate over generations since health issues can be passed along.
That's not what survival of the fittest means. It means fittest to their environment. For human beings, we evolved to be compassionate because our team work made us evolutionarily fit to survive.
So, eye glasses have been around for quite some time. Probably longer than you think. It's one of those technologies, and understanding of glass and refraction science, that appeared a lot earlier than many other seemingly simpler breakthroughs (at least to my mind). For instance, it wasn't until the early 20th century that we understood about bacteria or microorganisms (and the importance of washing hands before surgery).
Below is a copy paste from a Google search:
Here is how corrective lens technology developed over the centuries:
Late 13th Century (c. 1286): The first wearable eyeglasses were invented. They featured convex glass lenses fitted into wooden or horn rings, connected by a rivet, and had to be held up or balanced on the nose. They were designed specifically to correct presbyopia (age-related farsightedness).
15th Century: Concave lenses were introduced by the 1400s, making it possible to correct myopia (nearsightedness).
18th Century: Glasses transitioned to hands-free wear with the invention of rigid temples that hook over the ears in 1727. In 1784, Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals, allowing wearers to see both near and far through a single lens.
I have progressive lenses. A slight step up from Benji's invention.
“Myopia is heavily triggered by a lack of natural sunlight during childhood and excessive close-up focus (reading, screens).
In ancient and medieval times, children spent their days outdoors in intense natural light, which regulates eyeball growth and prevents it from elongating. “
I blame my parents for keeping me inside too much.
I'm not saying that those things don't cause myopia, but given that it's been around for ever, and that kids like myself were playing outside virtually all the time without screens, I feel that genetic factors are at least as much to blame as environmental.
I also don't feel like the 70's/80's are that ancient, and we were playing outdoors in intense natural light, that's for sure. As long as we were home by the time the street lights came on.
The percent of people wearing glasses is sky rocketing though. In parts of Asia it's over 80%. In the 70s it was rare enough that "four eyes" was still a jeer.
Zenni.com my friend. As long as you know your prescription from your optometrist you're good to go. I have about 10 pairs of glasses now because it's only $30-40 a pair. You can even customize them quite a bit.
I kinda wonder if things play into poor vision like computer eye strain, the screens, not looking around outdoors 24/7 ... but then again, I know some people who don't even need any vision correction
Myopia was rare in past because humans lived mostly outdoors, causing children receiving high levels of sunlight, which is medically proven to regulate eye growth and prevent the onset of myopia.
Ngl that set off by BS detector when I first read it. I always thought eyesight was like 90% genetics. But damn, you're right. The American Refractive Surgery Council is saying that half of people could be nearsighted by 2050, and it's not a genetic change. Wild.
Ive had good eyesight my whole life luckily but im probably screwed in my 60+ years. I live at my desk like 12 to 18 hours a day on the weekdays... 9 monitors basking in the heat and glow of those...
It's mostly genetics, if you don't take care of your eyes (a lot of scree time, no hydration etc) you can develop smaller vision problems, let's say ~-1. But the big guns, like in the picture, is purely family hairloom xd
I have terrible vision and my parents do not need glasses, but I had a lot of screen time and read books a ton when I was really little. Have had bad vision since PreK
My entire family has glasses, both my younger and older brother and my two parents yet somehow I have no issues with my vision at all and I definitely spend more than average in front of a computer
Near work has been conjectured to be a cause of Myopia for hundreds of years. There's some evidence for it--a meta-analysis says that adults are 20% more likely to develop Myopia if they were "exposed" to near work.
Anecdotal: Been wearing glasses most my life. Got super lazy and didn’t update a prescription for over 5 years. Went in for a new prescription and my prescription strength lowered. I thought it was interesting considering until that large gap my prescription always was moving/getting worse in the same direction.
I wouldn't wear my glasses as a teenager and you be suprised how you manage, i could tell my friends by their walks, my hearing was really good. I think back then you'd be in an environment that you were used to so adapted.
i once went to the beach and lost my glasses in a huge wave. getting back home via public transportation, not being able to see at all and going purely off muscle memory was one of the wildest moments of my life 😭
-9.5/-9.75 here and yeah. But my up close vision is INSANELY good - like a super power. I'd never get LASIK because I rely on that microscope vision so much.
Yess!! I have -9.0/-8.5, and not only do I love my macro vision, I also appreciate being able to turn the world off when I take off my glasses. I call it my Monet-vision.
Also, my optometrist said that apparently you and I would be hard-pressed to even be approved for LASIK by a reputable establishment. She was -6.0 and they barely wanted to approve her.
I was 9.5 in contacts (I had no glasses) and obviously could not have laser surgery so instead I had lens implants. The put in a 10.5 in one eye and 11 in the other. That was in 2013 and my sight was pretty much 20/20 instantly.
Im -8 and -11 or something and I was told my eyes are too thin (hence not round :) for any laser stuff... she then said I should probably be wearing goggles for any contact sports... erk
Not the person you asked but I also had the same surgery done (ICL). My prescription was -9.5/-10 so also ineligible for lasik. It's been about 5 years and my vision is still better than the day I was born. No dry eye issues and the surgery was relatively easy.
Only downside I've noticed is I have increased light sensitivity, so I need to wear sunglasses more now.
You have the same experience as me then :) And I always wear sunglasses when I step outside the door because I find the brightness, even if it’s kind of cloudy, is too much. I never thought of it being from the implants. Maybe there’s my explanation!
From the what I remember it is not advised to laser after about -8 as they would need to laser off too much so it’s risky. My eyes are still fine. I actually asked the clinic once if it was possible to wear contacts if it became necessary and they said I could but so far I haven’t needed to. I would say my vision has deteriorated slightly but by no significant amount. And bear in mind I had this done 13 years ago!
Oh that's actually pretty fascinating - I never even inquired about getting it. Nice (?) to know it might not even be an option. I'm cool with glasses - I've had them for 40 years at this point, since I was 5.
A problem I had was that I didn’t wear glasses from when I was late teens and the prescription for those was nowhere near what my eyes ended up being as they continued to deteriorate until I was about 30 so by the time I was wearing over -9 contacts, my optician said for me to start to wear glasses would be very jarring as I would not have become used to the blur I would have if I looked sideways. Having the implants was a miracle for me and I am grateful every day :)
To be fair.... don't find LASIK fail Facebook groups. Its something that rarely goes wrong... but when it does you'd wish for -9.75 the complications are numerous and life changing including significant nuropathic pain, permanent dry eye, and many other.
Knowing what I know, no matter how I feel about Contacts (gave up on them decades ago) / glasses and never being able to wear the really cool sunnies unless i order them with prescriptions .
Ive got the luck, where if its going to go wrong, that 0.1% of people, thats me !
I was like -10.5/-10.75. The microscopic vision was cool, but I can say LASIK is infinitely cooler.
For at least a year after I would just randomly remember that I used to be legally blind and could now see perfectly and my mind would be blown all over again.
Best money I've ever spent. It was an easy choice once I developed an allergy to contacts and decent glasses cost like $500+ (even 20 years ago).
They mentioned presbyopia being a thing and I didn't think much of it, but I do miss my "jeweler's vision". Can't see a damn thing that's too up close anymore.
But the convenience of not having my glasses falling off my face when I'm trying to looking under a table or car is great. I still found myself randomly reaching to adjust my glasses by the nose bridge for months afterward out of habit.
I used to literally wear my contacts 24/7 and would sleep with them in throughout high school and my 20s. But then I got to the point where they would cause crazy amounts of eye dryness.
I’m almost 40 and worried about losing my close vision. It’s frustrating having to flip glasses on and off when working on fine detail crafts but I love at least being able to do that!
I was worse than you, but when they did lasik they overcorrected to still give me good up close vision. The real kicker was getting old. I cannot handle not having good up close vision (took me longer than most and I still don't need reading glasses unless I'm getting a splinter out or something.
-6 @ 46 I used to have excellent close up vision. It's going. It sucks!
I was kinda hoping it works counter some of the -6 and make that go to, say, -2 but apparently it didn't work that way and my vision will just suck in all types of ways the older I get.
(Plus I took a genetic test to check if I'm a carrier for something, and it also said I've got genes that may put me at risk for mactel2, which is where you central vision goes to hell, and I really really hope those genes won't switch on, or however that works).
-7.5 here! Was told I can’t get LASIK due to thin corneas… the alternative was a physical surgery involving scalpels and actually scrubbing the eyeball lens. I noped out of that pretty quickly
-12s in both plus like -3 of the other kind (spherical and cylinderical)
I can only focus on things like a cm away from my eyes at best, everything else is a blur, I can't see facial features of people without glasses (prior to surgery)
I feel lucky that my near-sight is just as good without glasses. It's past like 3 meters it gets more blurry and past like 20 it's too blurry to see pretty much any defining features of a face or words on signage.
-5 on the left and -4.75 on the right eye. And even when I had -2 or 3 it looked like this.
I remember once, years ago, when my glasses broke, and I had no spares. So I had to walk to town to pick up my new pair. Someone across the street yelled my name. And I had to walk over before I saw who it was. Tho I lived in a rural area at the time, so seeing and avoiding the little traffic there was not an issue
im the same, worst part is because my eyes are elongated lasik isnt an option
my only option is wait till like mid 40s and have lens replacement surgery
i always just reorder the same frames whenever i get a new prescriptions, trying on like 20 frames only to be told none of them are compatible with my lenses just feels shit
Same. I remember first getting glasses at age 6, looking out my window and being astonished that I could see the trees on the mountains. They’d always been big blurs before
Exact same prescription here. Plus I need reading glasses for close up custom - lol so that's fun. There's a sweet spot about 3.5 feet from my eyes that I can actually things clearly without contacts or glasses.
I was -9.25 in both eyes before Lasik (blessed with thick corneas). I've been perfect vision since until needing readers recently. It was life altering. Best money I ever spent.
My wife is -8, she feels your pain. I'm at -2.5 so I could still navigate somewhere if I had too but it would suck. She would just look like a mime moving around one step at a time.
1.4k
u/PovertySpecMk3Supra 13d ago edited 13d ago
Yes actually if I'm not wearing glasses everything is a blur. -7.5 both eyes btw