How Did Ancient Humans Survive Without Glasses?

For 300,000 years nobody on Earth owned a pair of glasses. So how did people hunt, sew and survive when their eyes went blurry? In the 1960s an eye researcher tested Inuit families in Alaska and found something that still shocks eye doctors today. This video follows the eye through human history. Why only 2 of about 130 Inuit parents in Barrow were nearsighted while more than half of their children were. Why 96.5 percent of young men in Seoul need glasses. Chicks in goggles, retinal dopamine, and why 40 extra minutes of daylight changed myopia rates in Guangzhou schools. Then the problem nobody escaped: the lens that stiffens after 40. How Hadza grandmothers, Stone Age toolmakers and seamstresses kept working with blurry near vision. Inuit snow goggles, the word "myopia", and Shanidar 1, a half-blind Neanderthal who survived for years because his group took care of him. Finally, the long road to the first lens: eye surgery fees in the Code of Hammurabi, Egyptian kohl, cataract couching, the Nimrud lens, Seneca's water globe, Nero's emerald, Ibn al-Haytham, reading stones, and the Pisa craftsman who made the first spectacles around 1286. CHAPTERS 0:00 A needle you can't see 0:44 2.2 billion people with poor vision 1:46 Barrow, Alaska: parents vs children 2:35 Aboriginal Australians and Seoul 3:36 How a nearsighted eye forms 4:58 How much light your ancestors got 5:32 Sydney, Singapore, Guangzhou, Taiwan 6:56 Close work and the Jerusalem study 7:36 Growing up 20,000 years ago 8:03 A hunter's eyesight 8:27 What about people born with bad eyes? 8:47 Squinting and Inuit snow goggles 9:46 The group, movement and other senses 10:37 Presbyopia: the problem nobody escaped 11:37 Did ancient people live long enough? 12:07 Hadza grandmothers 13:03 Back to the bone needle 13:52 What older people knew 14:07 Blindness and Shanidar 1 15:22 The first eye doctors: Babylon and Egypt 16:39 Cataract couching 17:13 Lenses of the ancient world 18:32 Scribes and the first spectacles 19:43 Glasses for the nearsighted 20:45 We created the problem first 21:16 So how did they survive? 21:58 Your eyes and daylight