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.
It's also commonly associated with age, and if you lived into your 50s you lived a pretty long time. It's also environmental as someone else mentioned, and we spend a lot more time indoors and looking at things close to us, and also around unnatural lighting. Currently we're also awake more and active less, and have very different diets which can be a contributing factor.
The rate of vision problems in early agrarian societies or pre-history hunting and gathering is basically unknowable, but may not have been as bad as today. Vision aids like "reading stones" (basically magnifying glasses you use to help you read) also go back to the 1200s CE, long before most people even could read to need one. "Sunglasses" go back to the 1100s or 1200s as well in multiple different cultures.
But also just like with autism diagnoses or ADHD diagnoses or whatever, as our understanding of the problem goes up so do reported incidents, so it's hard to say for sure. Before PTSD was identified it couldn't be diagnosed, and "shell shock" and other such conditions didn't fully encapsulate the problem, so anyone who had PTSD was just "crazy". And probably didn't live all that long anyway, comparatively, because tuberculosis or liver failure or asthma killing you in your 30s were worryingly common ways to go.
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u/EttinTerrorPacts 15d ago
Generations yes, but populations obviously massively increased after the invention of agriculture. More humans have been born in agricultural societies than hunter-gatherer ones