In August 1999, after a solar eclipse seen in the United Kingdom, hospitals received more than 1,000 calls from people worried about eye damage; 14 cases of serious eye injury were confirmed.
"Most of the known cases resulted from looking at the sun without protecting the eyes," the medical journal The BMJ reported. "In one of the more serious cases the patient had reportedly looked at the sun for around 20 minutes without protection."
This after a concerted public health campaign that warned against looking at the eclipse.
If the supposedly educated denizens of the Information Age can fall prey to ignorant impulse during an eclipse, how could the (perhaps) shorter-lived, supposedly uneducated societies of prehistory not have suffered catastrophes of widespread retinopathy?
Elizabeth Horton, station archaeologist at Toltec Mounds Archeological State park, thinks "it's a good possibility" some ancient people would have damaged their eyes. On the other hand, "I would imagine you don't on a normal day stare at the sun," she says. "Some folks probably had some sense of 'Don't stare at it. It doesn't matter that something freaky is happening, you probably should not be staring at that.' But who knows?
"Literally, who knows?"
George Sabo III, director of the Arkansas Archeological Survey, figures if moderns can learn from other people's mistakes, ancients could, too. Even without a written language, safety advice could have been passed from generation to generation, as stories, in art or as teachings entrusted to trained members of the community.
He sees persuasive evidence in Osage Indian traditions in which individuals studied for years to take on the job of preserving the community's wisdom. And people have always been resourceful in general, he says. In the Arctic, ancient Inuits made walrus-ivory goggles carved with deep slits that reduced the glare of sunlight banging off snow and ice.
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"People think of clever things like that to do that protect themselves," he says.
It's also worth noting that, in 1999, the United Kingdom was home to an estimated 58.9 million people -- and the overwhelming majority of them did not wreck their eyes by gaping upward when the moon's shadow fell upon them.
-- Celia Storey
ActiveStyle on 08/21/2017