Comment on But I am mighty!!
merc@sh.itjust.works 5 hours agoMaybe tens of thousands of years ago, but 2000ish years ago 60ish was old age. The main reason life expectancy has gone up isn’t that old people didn’t make it to 50, it’s that young people didn’t make it to 2. If a couple has 5 kids, 3 of them die as toddlers and the other two make it to 70 the average life expectancy is about 30, but that doesn’t mean living past 30 is unusual.
Also, tens of thousands of years ago there was an ice age, but for the last 10k years light-skinned Europeans still had normal summers and worked in the fields.
kerrigan778@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 hours ago
Yes, that is when we evolved
MutilationWave@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours ago
You must know how averages work. The poster is correct. Average age at death is a horrible metric when you have gigantic birth and infant mortality rates.
kerrigan778@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 hours ago
No, I mean that for the brunt of humans evolving to be genetically roughly what we are today, it is unlikely many people were living much past their prime. I am talking about roughly 100,000 years ago up to around 10,000 years ago when humans developed from a largely hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
MutilationWave@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 hours ago
People who live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle today live 65+ regularly. The average may be lower for uncontacted peoples for various reasons, or higher because of reduced disease transmission. I imagine it depends on the group.
Now, I will give you that humans have refined their techniques of hunting etc over that 90k years in a way that caused less accidental deaths.
The crux of the matter though is that the statistical averages you have seen are flawed by infant mortality. In these societies, if you made it past toddler age you were statistically likely to live a long time.
What would be killing people much past their “prime” and how do you define prime?
merc@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
And only then?
sowitzer@lemm.ee 4 hours ago
Speak for yourself.