Current Events > How did cavemen and shit see without glasses?

(+) Yeah! (+)

So many people have corrective lenses nowadays. Did pre-corrective lens folk just not see all that well, or was vision better back then? Did the invention of glasses make bad eyesight irrelevant for natural selection purposes?
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survival of the fittest
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How were they able to see with their forehead sticking like a foot out
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We took care of that asshole while he stoked the fire
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Glasses seem to be extremely old from what I see.
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https://www.livescience.com/27850-social-brain-beat-neanderthal-vision.html

"Neanderthals had a characteristic "bun head" shaped skull which allowed for expanded visual processing in the back of the brain. That left them less head space for the frontal lobe, which governs social cognition."

""We have a social brain, whereas Neanderthals appear to have a visual brain," said Clive Gamble, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, who was not involved in the study."

"As a result, the extinct hominids had smaller social and trading networks to rely on when conditions got tough. That may have caused Neanderthals to die off around 35,000 years ago."

"To help solve the riddle, Dunbar and his colleagues looked at 13 Neanderthal skull fossils dating from 25,000 to 75,000 years ago and compared them with 32 anatomically modern human skeletons. The researchers noticed that some of the Neanderthal fossils had much larger eye sockets, and thus eyes, than do modern humans. [10 Odd Facts About the Brain]

Low lighting

The team concluded that Neanderthals used their oversized eyes to survive in the lower-light levels in Europe, where the northern latitude means fewer of the sun's rays hit the Earth. (Modern humans also tend to have slightly bigger eyes and visual systems at higher latitudes than those living in lower latitudes, where light levels are higher.) The researchers hypothesized that Neanderthals must, therefore, also have had large brain regions devoted to visual processing."

"Anatomically modern humans, meanwhile, evolved in Africa, where the bright light required no extra visual processing, leaving humans free to evolve larger frontal lobes.

By calculating how much brain space was needed for other tasks, the team concluded that Neanderthals had relatively less space for the frontal lobe, a brain region that controls social thinking and cultural transmission."


I wonder if our vision issues has anything to do with traits from interbreeding between homo sapiens and the other living hominid at the time?
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They didnt.
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I see without glasses
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Their eyesight wasn't degraded by bad genetics yet and computer screens
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Many of them likely would have died without the support of a community to take care of them in their failing health. So a lot of us probably just died once we could no longer see well enough to take care of ourselves. That said, it's not like life expectancy was all that long anyway.
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Now I am picturing a trud wearing glasses...
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myztikrice posted...

Their eyesight wasn't degraded by bad genetics yet and computer screens

It was degraded by disease and Ook stare at sun
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Reading things (or just focusing on close objects for long periods of time) contributes to and expediates degradation of eyesight. Most people can get by without corrective lenses anyway, especially if they've never had them so they're used to their poor vision. The main reason people get them is for reading things from a distance (classroom boards, road signs, etc). As odd as it sounds, it probably wasn't as important back then to have perfect vision.

There's also the fact that people didn't always live long enough for it to get so bad as to be debilitating.
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DawkinsNumber4 posted...

I wonder if our vision issues has anything to do with traits from interbreeding between homo sapiens and the other living hominid at the time?

The article you posted says Neanderthals had superior vision. Interbreeding would have been a benefit for our eyesight if anything.
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weapon_d00d816 posted...

DawkinsNumber4 posted...

I wonder if our vision issues has anything to do with traits from interbreeding between homo sapiens and the other living hominid at the time?

The article you posted says Neanderthals had superior vision. Interbreeding would have been a benefit for our eyesight if anything.

That's not how evolution works though. Their eyes were better but also completely different than ours so to incorporate such a thing with our DNA when they were barely close enough genetically to mate with to begin with would lead to a high possibility of genetic issues. We see similar issues with our digestive and immune systems thanks to neanderthals.
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ooga can't see shit!!
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myztikrice posted...

Their eyesight wasn't degraded by bad genetics yet and computer screens

Studies show that bad eyesight has more to do with how much sunlight you are exposed to, rather than reading and computer screens.
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Why did the caveman fall down the well?

He couldn't see that well.
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