Re:Is It Better to Be Poor in Bangladesh or the Mississippi ...
by zeroer on Thursday March 09, 2017 @02:50PM
(#13832751)
> I have poor eyesight, no amount of practice would ever allow me to throw a spear and hit a wild animal.
What, specifically, is your eyesight problem? There's some growing suggestive evidence that our eyes need time outside in bright sunlight to develop properly. Depending on your particular sight problem, it may very well be the case that a failure to be outside attempting to throw a spear and hit a wild animal as a child is the cause of your problem.
https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/time-outdoors...
Re:Is It Better to Be Poor in Bangladesh or the Mississippi ...
by com2kid on Friday March 10, 2017 @04:16PM
(#13842188)
> What, specifically, is your eyesight problem?
I'm missing an optic nerve. Sunlight isn't going to fix that. :)
Re:Is It Better to Be Poor in Bangladesh or the Mississippi ...
by Retric on Friday March 10, 2017 @12:44PM
(#13840427)
Good vision is less necessary for hunting than you might think. One common hunting role is simply to walk though an area while making a lot of noise. Abstractly large numbers of people have poor vision in large part because our ancestors could get by with poor vision. Traps and fishing are other examples with minimal requirements in terms of vision.
Remember, hunter gathers don't need to read tiny text, or the pattern of bark on a tree. So, even what we think of as poor vision was actually often 'good enough'.
Survivorship bias. I have poor eyesight, no amount of practice would ever allow me to throw a spear and hit a wild animal. Heck with lots of occupational therapy as a kid, I can kinda-sorta catch a ball. On a good day.
I'll say that falling out of trees was a lot easier (even fun!) as a kid though. I do worry that the current generation doesn't have much unstructured play time.
> We walked around barefoot, unsupervised, climbed trees, ate wild fruit, made spears from wood and once you were four you had to take your two year old sibling with you and look after them.
Growing up working class in 80s and early 90s suburbia was awfully similar. Except we had to wear shoes when it got too hot, concrete is friendly to cars, not feet. :( But yeah, we ran around all summer day long without parents getting involved. The littler kids were looked after (dragged home for diaper changes though!), we road bikes all around, picked berries from the woods, got hatchets and chopped down small trees to make clearings in the woods.
Now days? I am not quite sure what childhood is like for the current generation. I know that I've see less and less groups of kids running around every year, and I haven't really seen any in the last few years, but maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.