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>>Previously people died younger, so couldn’t

I'm not sure that's true - people died younger, sure, but they also had kids much earlier. Even assuming 18 for first child(and it often was earlier than 18), you'd be a great grandparent at the age of 54 - and people have commonly lived that long even in antiquity.



Have a look at the graph here - ‘Life expectancy by world region, from 1770 to 2018’

The average lifespans was only 40-something until the 1850-1950 range.

I’m sure plenty lived longer, but the average was terrible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy


Those figures are heavily skewed by high infant mortality rates.


Read the "other measures" part of the article.

"While the most common age of death in adulthood among modern hunter-gatherers (often taken as a guide to the likely most favourable Paleolithic demographic experience) is estimated to average 72 years,[169] the number dying at that age is dwarfed by those (over a fifth of all infants) dying in the first year of life, and only around a quarter usually survive to the higher age."

Etc.


Yeah, I don’t know why people actually believe everyone died at 40 clearly that that’s not true. You’ve met a 40-year-old, right? Here’s a popular one include all the abortions as deaths and you’ll see that the average age that we live now is also 40


Why would you include abortions too? My wife had a miscarriage at 3 months in, should we include that in stats too?




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