Hacker News Reader

Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Romans were believed to have a 'pale white' skin. They lived in Rome, and while there are records of sunshades (Velarium), it doesn't seem they were common. For example, the colosseum, a place people might stay many hours, had only 30% coverage.

I don't think someone with similar skin would last long in Rome in the sun today...

View on HN

> A strong distinction in skin color is frequently seen in the portrayal of men and women in Ancient Rome. Since women in Ancient Rome were traditionally expected to stay inside and out of the sun, they were usually quite pale; whereas men were expected to go outside and work in the sun, so they were usually deeply tanned

Those commoners sometimes wore hats (pileus)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_ancient_Roman_...

There are also descriptions of treatments for sunburn.

There's no doubt that the ozone layer depletion increases the amount of UV light that we receive. Sometimes dramatically(very location dependent). But it's not like people could just toast in the sun all day without protection and not get burned.

Modern people barely spend time outside compared to the Romans. No wonder we're getting sunburnt when we finally go out in peak summer. If you spend most of your time outside year round, you'll develop a natural deep tan which offers considerable protection from the sun.

Why risk melanoma for a little bit of "natural protection" when sun screen exists?

AFAIK the biggest risk of melanoma occurs from sunburn. I would guess a protective tan from regular sunlight is probably healthy overall (depending on how you get your tan: confounding benefits and risks for any activity would drown out signal?). Lifestyle risks trump melanoma risks.

Chronic sun exposure affects the skin differently than intermittent:https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Differential-dependence-...

If you stay indoors 95% of your time, then yes, by all means, use as much sunscreen as you can.

If you spend most of your time outside your whole life, your skin is already conditioned to deal with UV damage.

Otherwise we would have gone extinct due to skin cancer, aren't we?

People also had much lower life expectancies. I don't think it's useful to say that because the people in antiquity didn't have sun protection they were stronger or somehow immune to sunburns ... maybe they just died before living long enough for it to matter.

Or maybe they all died from cancers of all kinds, just not categorized as such, or died by murder / wars before cancer became an issue.

The vast majority of historically lower life expectancies is due to changes in death rates in the first few years. People who made it to adulthood weren't all keeling over at 35.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-age-15...

Life expectancy at age 15 has gone up from 60 to 90

That’s still a massive increase

Reply on news.ycombinator.com