this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
1243 points (99.4% liked)

Science Memes

11441 readers
1611 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
1243
Cheeky (mander.xyz)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
227 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 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€“] [email protected] 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.