• RedditRefugee69@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 month 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.