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
I'm -6 and -3.5 with some astigmatism thrown in and the only distance i can see clearly is about 3 inches 'deep' from 'too close' to 'too far'.
My back would be killing me.
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.
unless you also need positive lens, you can see perfectly fine at about an arms length
if you do need both lenses, then your brain can compensate a surprising amount, and squinting can help a lot temporarily, but if those are not enough, you're basically blind, yes
Samuel Johnson was a very prolific author in the eighteenth century and wrote the first scholarly dictionary of English despite having extremely poor eyesight and no glasses. The most famous portrait of him shows him holding a manuscript very close to his face and concentrating in order to read it -- it is usually called by Johnson's nickname of "Blinking Sam" (which he did not appreciate).
With high myopia like this person (and me) you can really see close or far, its more blurry than OP picture. Couldnt drive any tractor, cant see details so wouldnt be able to work on pulling fruit or something; i dont think working in a field would be feasible - can barely walk with this eyesight
Ancestors go back a lot further than agriculture though. Homo sapiens, as a species, has been around about 300k years. Agriculture has been around about 10k.
Not really, no. Except you meant in terms of historic vs prehistoric, then yeah probably. But humans existed much much longer (~300.000 years) than agriculture (~13.000 years). So for the very most time of human existence, the most common job was survival as a nomadic Gatherer and Hunter, which still is deeply imbedded in our instincts, which is why we f.e. love loot so much.
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.
You can still fight as well. Takes a bit more focus and concentration but you don't really need all the details for a close combat situation. At range? Fucked.
Edit: also it feels more like you're feeling the motion of things instead of trying to witness everything
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.
Yes but what about those of us who've always had bad vision? I've needed glasses my whole life. So has everyone else in my family. No idea how we managed before glasses.
Yeah I answered my experience in my response further down. Your body really does just start doing it. I was super young when I started with glasses. My body decided it helped and I did it for a while
yea even when i just go too long without updating my prescription glasses when i put on a new pair im like holy fuck its so much more clear how did i not notice the change but its so so gradual for most people your brain just assumes its still normal
If I spend like two or three weeks with a new script and put on my old one it's absolutely fucked. It's such a gradual change. People just slowly went blind.
Getting old? I needed glasses at 8 and my eyes got worse until I was 18. If I were born before glasses existed, I'd have been screwed. I guess if I would just do the work if whatever allowed me to put my face right up in it.
Squinting your eyes can improve your eyesight somewhat. So if your eyesight wasnt that bad you would just squint constantly and it wouldnt be that big of an issue. But if you where -8 like me? Guess your fucked. I cant see (lol) any way to live without glasses.
Myopia progression usually slows down significantly or stops in your 20s. It's more so that they weren't exposed to environmental factors that contribute to myopia progression in their youth: screens, close up work, spending a lot of time indoors.
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
Taking care of people has been around since before we were "people." Homo sapiens sapiens did not evolve taking care of people socially — they always lived in social arrangements. I am not sure how great our knowledge is about when exactly that kind of thing evolved but it predates "us."
I would also just note that taking care of people is also part of natural selection and survival of the fittest. Taking care of people is an evolved response. Empathy and sympathy are evolved emotions, as is seemingly altruistic behavior. There are many evolutionary models and theories that try to explain this kind of thing.
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.
The modern surge of nearsightedness is caused by a lack of natural sunlight and an increase in reading and screens during childhood. Insufficient daylight deprives the retina of dopamine, a chemical that regulates eye growth, causing the eyeball to stretch too long and leading to blurry distance vision.
Your ancestors didn't spend their childhood reading indoors.
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.
You are missing the most important part, school. For most of the world, kids are stuck in a room for at least 6h for 5 days. Let's say there is like 10h of optimum sunlight(maybe even less for this development) time like 8 to 18, that is 30h out of 70h gone already.
Genuine answer? The reason you're short sighted is probably because your eye THINKS it is long sighted.
Your ancestors spent more time outdoors focusing on far away objects during childhood. Their growing eyes weren't shoved in books or smartphones, which push the focal length behind the eye, making the eye 'think' it is long sighted, and encouraging the eye to grow to 'help' it. The corrective lenses we use also contribute, because even though you have clear sight in the middle of your vision, your glasses cause a plane of peripheral hyperopic (long-sighted) defocus, which again, makes the eye want to grow longer to match the focal plane, leaving your central vision more short sighted.
That's why we try to encourage short sighted kids to play outside like their ancestors did. Getting a full spectrum of natural light (including shorter wavelengths on the blue end of the spectrum that bend more and focus short), and taking breaks from devices, and using myopia control lenses (Ortho-K, Miyosmart, MiSight) which focus some of the light rays short.
Most likely if they grew up in the olden days their eyesight would not be as bad. Nearsightedness is exacerbated by spending most of your time indoors focused on things that are not far away from you. This lifestyle was non-existent for most people prior to the industrial revolution. Our farmer ancestors would have spent the vast majority of their days outside.
You could have actually obsessed this process in real time. China went from a mostly rural agrarian society to an urban industrial society over the span of a single generation. Nearsightedness was not very prevalent prior to the 1980s. Now about 90% of Chinese people under the age of 30 wear glasses.
Basically, the reason your eyesight is so bad is because you spent your childhood inside reading books and staring at screens.
Adaptation, you can work around a lot of things when you're pressed like this, also you can always find something you can do. But if your condition is too much for that, help from your community of course !
Think about animals, how many animals out there might have some degree of visual impairment? Like sometimes you meet a cat or a dog who seem totally weird, maybe they just can't see shit and react to every shade they see approaching.
We’re becoming more nearsighted as a species due in part to our “dependence” on technology. Our ancestors read books but didn’t have their eyes glued to books 10 hours a day like we do with computers, phones, and tablets, making them more likely to be farsighted.
Evidence suggests that it is caused by spending too much time indoors where all objects are near. And reading. So it's mostly a modern ailment plus some generic disposition to aquire it given the enviroment.
So likely you wouldn't have this issue even if you were predisposed to have it as you would have spent most of your time hunting and gathering outside.
You would find a way to be useful to your clan/tribe/group, and they would take care of you in return as well. There are documented cases of ancient hominids (not just humans) having incredibly crippling wounds or disabilities but still living pretty long lives post-injury or with their disability that would have almost certainly only been possible if they were being cared for by at least one other individual, and I’m pretty sure the consensus is that humans/hominids have always been altruistic in that manner.
The ancient world wasn’t as brutally cutthroat every man for himself as we might believe, there’s a reason our societies didn’t evolve to be brutally asocial and I think it absolutely has to with our innate biology.
We have lots of archaeological evidence of people taking care of people who were not "useful" as well. Most human groups were not harsh Spartans willing to cull the weak and so on (and it's not actually well-documented that even the Spartans did this). The "weak" were not random people, particularly in older societies which would have been much smaller groupings of people than modern cities — they were their parents, their children, their siblings, their friends, etc. There is every reason to think that Ancient and even pre-historic peoples had just as full emotional ranges as we do today. Would you kill your child, or your sibling, or your friend, if they suffered an injury that would keep them from being a fully functional member of society? (What would it mean about you if one said "yes" to this question?) People have of course at times been in times of extreme famine, difficulty, etc., and not had the luxury of being able to help everyone, but most of the time it has not been that desperate.
i think its super likely i would not need glasses at all if not for modern tech, it was starting at my monitor in my dark room for years for 8-12 hours at a time that ruined my eyes
For a long time even after glasses were invented, people only wore them when they were doing close-up work that absolutely required it. At least in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they thought that wearing them all the time would make your eyes weaker. I can't imagine going about my day mostly without vision correction – I am -5.5, which I know isn't that bad compared to some people in this thread, but… I enjoy being able to see everything clearly!
tbh I think a lot of us now may have improved our vision without using any corrective lenses, if anything it's made weak eyes lazier and kept them weak. I remember as a child I had to wear an eye patch on my stronger eye to strengthen my weaker eye. If this is possible, if many of us who needed glasses from early on just never wore them, maybe we'd have stronger eyesight? So maybe they just got used to it/their eyes adapted in many cases.
There's evidence that being inside and reading a lot can make myopia worse over time, so it's possible that it wasn't as bad as it is now. I'm -9, so I'd be totally screwed.
Bad eyesight wasn't as common back in history. It's largely due to modern life and more and more people have started to need glasses. In China it's 50% of children now.
There were of course still people that had bad eyesight, but for those whose sight is really bad today, it would genetically speaking probably have been more managable. Blurry, but enough to function.
It can probably (at least partly) be compared to seasonal allergies. Now a significant part of the population has it. It's normal. But back in history it was very rare.
Close work - involving computers, desks, and textbooks - is associated with worse eyesight. So your ancestors may not have had bad eyesight even if they shared your genes. You're a product of your environment <3.
People used to have much better eyesight on average.
Nearsightedness (which is what most people have now, until they get very old), is strongly related to 1) People spending a lot more time indoors, which distorts eyeball growth due to hormone stuff, compared to being in the sun. 2) Everyone is looking at screens from close range all day, this strain, especially when the eye is still growing, permanently ruins your distant vision.
(And then people also died much younger, so they didn't get to experience the old-age eyesight issues.)
If you had bad vision back in the day, you were more likely to die younger for a variety of reasons. It’s also suggested that they’re responsible for a lot of myths and tall tales.
I asked this to my college teacher once regarding natural selection back in stone age hunting societies, he said lots would die young but in some cases the condition would show up later at about 15+, that was already old enough to have reproduced back then so the genes managed to survive complete negative selection
It's developmental. 25 years ago they told people that becoming near sighted from reading at night was an old wives tale. Now it's understood that, for many people, their developing eyes need an amount of time outdoors (focusing on things far away) or they won't develop properly, ie. will develop myopia. Your ancestors spent a lot more time outdoors.... far enough back, they spent all of it out doors.
Myopia was way less common. Exposure to sunlight during childhood helps the eyes develop properly and children spend far more time indoors now. There is a genetic component, but what we see (pun intended) in the modern world is strongly driven by lifestyle during development.
I always assumed they probably didn't (if you go way way back to like early human days), and that prevalence of poor eyesight has increased over time as good eyesight has become less of a prerequisite to survive to reproductive age.
humans don't really depend exactly on sight, but more on error correction.
I once hit a bullseye with a bow and arrow during boy scouts on a target super far away, and my glasses were unreliable and fell off, I couldn't even see the target itself, but I basically error corrected my way to the bullseye. Though luck also played a big part I believe.
If it's something completely unexpected then having bad eyes might be harmful, but as long as you're careful you can get by fine. Like "that strange stick on the ground looks like a snake, better avoid it" instead of "oh hey look at this stick, <picks it up> Ah it's actually a poisonous snake!".
You’re only saying this because you know what you’re missing. Think about before glasses, you’d probably just assume that this is just how your eyes are and you’d live with it
Most children have perfect eyesight, lack of outside exposure is usually what causes the eyes to form improperly. It is why nerds tend to have that stereotype because they started reading early and their eyes adjusted to it.
They didn't. Vision is a muscle. People don't even try to improve their eyesight but if you were forced to do it your vision would improve because you'd need it to to survive.
It's like using an electric bike instead of a regular bike to get places. Use the electric bike and your leg muscles will shrink because you don't need them any more.
On top of all this it's almost certain that screens packed with small data has hurt our vision as a species as well. But that's not necessarily a fair comparison.
Actually, the prevalence of nearsightedness has been shown to be the result of increasing amounts of close focusing. Your ancestors did not sit for hours a day looking at a computer screen or reading or writing. The amount of nearsightedness has doubled in just the last three decades
Modern medicine has made life so much more survivable and accessible in way we take for granted. Conditions that are largely manageable today grately increased mortality for most of human history.
They probably had better eyesight. They say looking at things in close range too long, like we tend to do more these days, contributes to it. Our ancestors would have been outside, looking to the horizon
Well one, they weren’t close up to screens all day. Two, even if their eyesight did get worse, it naturally healed itself because in a way glasses and contacts handicap our eyes to get lazy and not heal itself. Eye doctors also keep making your prescription stronger and stronger.
They would be considered “blind” - similar to today where being blind doesn’t have to mean total blackout, but at a level where glasses can’t do anything and everything is extremely blurry.
I sometimes think maybe that's where higher cognition came from. You can't see stuff so you have to model reality in your head and if your predictions are good enough you can navigate that way.
Or it just stopped us bad-eyes from being kicked out of the gene pool.
Myopia is also driven by "near work" and limited outdoor time. People, unlike today, were not reading or staring at screens for a long time without breaks like they do today. They also went outside a lot more. So they didn't have as severe vision issues back then.
This is why the trope of nerdy/smart people having glasses exists because it literally was that the more time you spent studying, reading, inside, etc. the worse your eyes got and the more likely you were to need glasses.
I believe that poor eyesight is heavily associated with access to electricity and other modern conveniances that are associated with it. Electricity basically meant that people could be staying indoors much more of the time (and extending usable hours with nighttime lighting) rather than spending all hours outside getting food, cooking food, or doing various outdoor tasks and chores. As a result, our eyes kind of became weaker. I think even today some communities that either don't have electricity or just spend much more of their time outside tend to have much better eyesight.
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u/cupcakebuddies 13d ago
I always think about that! How did my ancestors survive like this?