this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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Science Memes

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[โ€“] RedditRefugee69@lemmynsfw.com 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

A reminder that life expectancy in ancient history was so low not because people generally croaked by 40, but because of how many children died young.

It's an average, not a maximum. People regularly lived into their 70s and 80s hundreds of years ago.

[โ€“] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 months ago

From what i've read and heard about the subject, the life expectancy generally looked something like this back in the hunter-gatherer days:

You were very likely to die as an infant, pretty likely to die before puberty, after that you were likely to make it to 40-50, and it wasn't that rare to reach 70.