[FridayoLeary]

The midges are horrific. It's amazing how something so tiny can make your life so miserable. I don't know how people in the olden days survived. I wonder what kind of social and political effects the midges had. I can imagine Scots with all their gifts of the mind and body fleeing and surrendering to the English just to get away from them.

[WalterBright]

> I don't know how people in the olden days survived.

Maybe they found a material they could smear on their body.

For a similar example, I have a friend who spends a lot of time hiking and camping. He tells me that the first day, he needs to apply sunscreen. The next day onward, he doesn't need to anymore, as his body oil and sweat seems to do the job.

It makes sense that our skin has not evolved to be cleaned every day.

[AlotOfReading]

People simply got used to it, for the most part. It takes me a few weeks to readjust to the insects whenever I go back to the Arctic, after which they're just dramatically less annoying.

Keep in mind that the swarms you see today are usually a historical anomaly exacerbated by changing conditions in the Arctic. Longer, warmer summers create more spaces for them to breed, and sudden, bitter cold spells in winter affect the predators controlling their population more than the insects themselves. The palearctic region is a very different place than it was centuries ago.

[throwup238]

In Scotland they would have smeared bog myrtle over themselves. Other alternatives were animal fat mixed with an aromatic or even tar and pine resin. As far as I know most cultures had some sort of equivalent.

The best contemporaneous example would be the otjize clay rub used by the Himba in Namibia. It’s largely an adaptation to water scarcity but it also protects them from insects and cleans their hair and skin by trapping dirt and flaking off.

[majormajor]

Most people don't have nearly that good luck.

I'm fortunate that they just don't like me as much as some of the people I've done week+ hiking/camping trips with. I was ok with deet. Some folks still got dozens of bites even after it.

[WalterBright]

I think you overlooked the mention of sunscreen.

[majormajor]

No? We all wore that too... but unless we're all just weirdos and sunscreen == bug repellant for the whole rest of the world in a way it never has for us (and is not advertised as), it just seemed irrelevant.

The sunscreen kept us from being bright red and in pain for the last 6 days of the trip. The mosquitos gave zero fucks about it.

I would bet that the lucky person whose "body oil and sweat seems to do the job" isn't the representative person here...

[WalterBright]

He never said it was a mosquito repellent. Just that he wouldn't burn the second day of sweating while hiking, and only needed the sunscreen for the first.