Comment by thrance
3 days ago
Just because our ancestors did something doesn't mean it's automatically good for your health. After all, prehistoric men weren't known for their long life expectancy.
3 days ago
Just because our ancestors did something doesn't mean it's automatically good for your health. After all, prehistoric men weren't known for their long life expectancy.
"After all, prehistoric men weren't known for their long life expectancy."
After surviving early years, people still used to get old. Infant mortality was just way higher bringing the average down. (And that those metrics often compare to poor peasants and our paleo ancestors were not peasants)
What data are you basing this on? My understanding is that historical life expectancy is only as low as it is because of the immense infant mortality rates. People who survived through childhood tended to live long.
Pretty much. Here's an in-depth look at mortality patterns in pre-modern societies: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...
> One quirk to these model tables I want to note, because it sometimes confuses folks, is that they express ‘life expectancy’ not as a total expected age, but as average years of life expectancy from a given age, so a 25-year-old with 26.6 years of life expectancy is expecting to life to age 51, not just a year and a half.
> What we see in these models is that life expectancy (female:male) at birth is very low, 25:22.8, but after the first year rises dramatically to 34.9:34.1 (note the gender gap narrowing) and by age 5 to 40.1:39.0 (remember to add the five years they’ve already lived). So life expectancy goes up quite a lot over the first several years of life, which is not, intuitively, the pattern we expect: we normally assume the more you’ve lived, the less years you have left.
Longer than is generally thought, but not as long as we do today either.