Think everyone died young in ancient societies? Think again
aeon.co
aeon.co
Look: a lot of sensational stuff about history is in fact bullshit. I recently read an article that demonstrated to my satisfaction that the whole "Easter Islander chopping down the last tree" idea is in fact fantasy and that rats, not people, ended up deforesting the place. Isn't it a shame that such a poetic example of the hubris of man ends up not actually being true?
In reality, the past was pretty much like the present, and people today are pretty much like those of the past. Theories that rely on our ancestors being somehow obviously stupid or short-lived or morally deficient fall short of explaining the real world. If you actually read the first-hand accounts of people from ancient times, you'll find, well, people, with all the usual insecurities and foibles and temptations that exist today. (See the beautiful and sensitive correspondence between Eloisa and Abelard.)
To risk making a broader point: I reject the whig-historical attitude in which the development of humanity is some kind of inexorable progression from an awful past to a benevolent present. In reality, the only progress is scientific --- physical laws, with numbers, that you write down and that work via math. Everything else is just a matter of fashion and taste, and there's no guarantee that our descendants will agree that what we consider "progress" is in fact good and right.
This graph suggests that a 20-year-old in 1850 would on average expect to live another 40 years, while a 20-year-old in 2015 would expect to live another 60 years: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Life-e...
That's an increase of 50%, which I would say is remarkable.
Would people in ancient times have lived significantly longer than people in 1850? If not, human lifespan has increased a great deal since ancient times.
... from an arbitrary starting point of 20. Why 20?
What I mean is, if you're 50, it's an increase of 200%, which you could say is even more remarkable except that it can't be as it's the same statistic?
I suspect almost ALL of this can be attributed to having plumbing that magically flushes your waste away, having people wash their hands after using the bathroom, and women being fed well enough to survive childbirth.
It's astonishing how much morbidity happened in the past just because water sources would get contaminated by people bathing or excreting into them. Apparently even a crazy amount of deaths in childbirth were attributable to bad hygiene/sanitation.
Once you correct for those three almost everything else looks like a little sliver. The presence of antibiotics is the only things that even come close in its impact. If we wanted to have a comparable additional impact today we'd need to accomplish something like wiping out all the disease-carrying insects (mosquitoes, tsetse flies, etc.)
I always thought the idea persists just because people don't instinctively understand averages. (I agree with the rest of your comment though).
And that's why using the average to compare is bad.
To say that the past was anything but a terrible place to live is to blind yourself to horrific realities about the way people have lived up until now. To imagine life was much like it is today is a massive anachronism, based often on one’s ignorance of the details of life in past societies that one pastes over with their own situation.
Going back as far as we can the life expectancy in the Paleolithic era if you made it to 15 was 54 years. Not far off from today's standard.
Individuals out of sight of the state or their overlords may have similar experiences in different ages, but there are also people who don't exist near the median who are persecuted to different degrees; not to mention that wealth distribution can also be radically different. These are also differences between modern societies, and may thus easily be inferred for past societies too. And your free choice of society today is not arbitrarily based in fashion or taste.
Consider telling Oscar Wilde that there's been no progress since his day, and he was merely a victim of fashion!
The progress is also not necessarily linear; Oscar Wilde would've no doubt preferred ancient Greece to his own time, about 2000 years later, when it comes to their attitude toward social progression. The sciences, by contrast, do tend to show unequivocal progress because they're essentially our growing understanding of the universe.
I agree that progress is not linear. Science also: people forget things, and are sometimes wiped out and their records lost.
This logic breaks down because it's not an inexorable march forward. However there were a number of societies pre-victorian Britain, in which homosexuality was fully accepted. Such as ancient Greece and at times Rome, and some pre-Roman Celtic societies.
Had their been progress between 0CE and 1900CE? Scientifically and economically, absolutely! Culturally? Well we don't watch people kill each other in the coliseum, or collect the heads of our enemies. OP's point is that all of this cultural 'progress' is just the fashion of the times and that there is no easy to discern linear progress like in science.
But it draws to the main point: what is a 'just society' who decides it, what is just for you may not be for me? For example in the USA punishment for crime (including 'victimless' crimes like downloading a song or film) is a major part of the justice system. Whereas in Sweden the main reason behind the justice system is rehabilitation. Is one more just than the other? What if it isn't a victimless crime? Do you think everyone agrees with you?
Does what is 'just' change over time, the idea of eye for an eye used to be pretty popular, whereas now, it is much less so.
I think this is what OP was getting at, the idea of what a just society is changes (changes is fashion). But I think you really got to the crux of it!
We advanced like an organism, improving in culture and knowledge as a group, but not on the individual scale. There's a reason the educated are just as susceptible to cargo-culting, trend-chasing and bandwagonning as anyone else; the primary difference is that the number of people capable of operating as authoritative figures for the educated is more limited. At best their education protects them in their own field, in the fashion of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
As a group we might have improved, but individually we still follow false gods and idols. We pretend they're not, and while ours might be somehow better than our predecessors (more predictive power, for one), they certainly don't come from a better basis.
And to think that everyone in the past was a true believer in the supernatural is to miss GP's point entirely.
As for willingness to violate human rights, I was first going to agree but I'm not actually sure that's the case, at least if you take into account the social environment. That is, I don't think the historical average Joe really wanted to violate human rights more, but he may have been forced to, as would we if put in the same circumstances. But that's probably what you mean by the progress we enjoy.
Stephen Pinker, while I disagree with him on a lot of things, has a couple of books that are essentially collections of every way that we can quantifiable show that the present is a better place to live than the past.
Spot on. This type of pride seems to prevent people from learning some lessons from the past.
However I see difference across modern societies in how much people are aware of the past.
Yes, we had the potential to live 80 years even 2 thousands years ago.
Was it common?
No.
Throw in better knowledge of good nutrition (less consumption of toxins) and the importance of exercise - inactivity is a slow killer.
Finally, psychology ... more to live for, and the means to enjoy it.
Work is purpose so long as it's engaging, and people with purpose do things to keep themselves going
My brother and I both shared a fear that our father would waste away and die after retirement (he is extremely driven). It turned out that he “never has enough time” for all the projects he creates for himself post-retirement. He wrote a book, researches the family tree, travels, etc. It was surprising how much he wants, and finds ways to, remain active. I don’t think we were wrong to expect him to need an outlet. We simply did not anticipate that he would create his own.
The oldest retirement age for senators in the US is 62. Alternatively anything over 50 if you’ve served more than 20 years.
Or any time at all once you’ve worked 25 years.
Of course they’ve also ensured retirement for them is retirement with full pay.
I’d love to get to retire with full pay after 25 years.
My grandfather lived for another 5 years than he probably would've without modern medicine. I don't know if they would've been able to operate on him in the 60's like they can in modern times.
With those 2 items, you can basically get to a life expectancy of 70 years in most places, then you add modern medicine, and you go up another 10 years or so.
So, I bet if you introduced modern medicine as the only change to an agrarian society you'd see an increase in life expectancy.
In this lecture "Return of the Microbes" the professor of medicine mentions in passing that in Victorian Britain a male adult had an slightly higher life expectancy than a male adult in today's Britain. He excludes children but also women for good reason.
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/return-of-the-...
1. Tooth wearing as a measure of age is complicated by bread. Saxon-era bread contains a lot of grit because it's ground between actual stones. Eating gritty bread wears down teeth. So a 30-year-old who ate bread their whole life would have teeth wear comparable to a much older person in a population that either didn't eat bread, or ate non-gritty bread (like we do today). We do know the Saxons were big bread-eaters. We don't know what population was used as the control for TFA.
2. The "grooming tool" thing is a little strange. The grooming tools appear as a set in the late Romano-British period, and vary between individuals, but are generally composed of tweezers, nail-cleaning blade, snips, a little spoon perfect for cleaning wax from ears, and similar stuff. They appear to have been worn dangling from the belt by a thong, carried around routinely like a Swiss army knife. It's reasonable to assume that at some point in your life, you got a set of them, either as a gift or because you could, and you carried on wearing them ever afterwards. So, yes, older people are more likely to have them ;) But not necessarily because old people were "higher status" or more into personal grooming.
My assumption has always been that infant mortality was a huge factor, but also that adult life expectancy was shorter. Perhaps not 40 years shorter, but shorter nonetheless because of disease and infection.
I'm not actually seeing anything much to contradict this here.
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/return-of-the-...
I find the second graph here much more compelling, which shows across the country that there has been a steady improvement over time from 1841 to the present - https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
I couldn't disagree more. Maybe in more primitive societies it hasn't - yet - but in Anglo-Saxon communities this is exactly what has and is changing. Today both women and men are praised for not only their power, but intelligence, integrity, communication and art among many other traits. As well as both men and women are praised today for their beauty, style and charm.
I can't believe such interesting article could get it so wrong in its conclusion.
Water 'purification' in most cases (on occasion it was boiled) did nothing to remove the tasteless toxins that can cause illness and water was mostly just judged by how clear it looked and how it tasted/smelled. Food safety again being something of a sniff/taste test. Vaccines of course would not be invented for thousands of years. Some of the quirks of their civilization included shared butt wiping sponges at public toilets - you'd clean off the sponge using either running water, or on occasion a bucket of vinegar. And so on.
The point of this is that if we provided these Ancient Greeks with nothing but urgent life-saving emergency care from modern technology, it's highly likely that their life expectancy would dwarf ours of today. So what exactly was it in their culture that we've lost? They did so many things so differently that we can probably all kick in some confirmation bias to support our own personal hypotheses for some particular subset. But I prefer to just look at things holistically and consider that aiming to emulate their lifestyles is probably a better overall way to aim for a long and healthy life than is relying so heavily on medicine and technology.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ancient_Greeks
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory
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EDIT: Just, completely coincidentally, saw another related article here [3]. Anyhow, it provides an important datum: "More than 23 percent of Americans took three or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days, according to a 2017 CDC estimate. Furthermore, 39 percent over age 65 take five or more, a number that’s increased three-fold in the last several decades. There are about 1,000 known side effects and 5,000 drugs on the market, making for nearly 125 billion possible side effects between all possible pairs of drugs. Most of these have never been prescribed together, let alone systematically studied, according to the Stanford researchers."
[3] - http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-predict-the-side-effects-of...
This is something you can't possibly determine. Ancient Greeks famous enough to have their own Wikipedia pages may not have had penicillin but on balance they certainly would have lived easier lives than peasants who worked years of hard labour just to survive, and would have lived longer because of it. It is also, quite literally, survivorship bias - people who lived to be older had more time to achieve things and become notable enough to make Wikipedia.
The thing with getting old, as noted in the article, is that past a certain age if one thing doesn't get ya, another thing probably will. Modern medicine is not a buff which will add +X years to all humans regardless of circumstance, it is just about staving off the first few things which try and kill you - and that's why, by all accounts (including this article), life expectancy is longer now than it was in the past.
And for the record boiling water works just fine at killing bacteria living in it. It's not magic and if your water is still full of arsenic you'll still die, but it's much better than nothing.
The life of the luxurious Ancient Greek would have likely been more interesting due to power and prestige, but they did not have objectively better lives in terms of 'things' than even an average individual today. And now a days I think it goes without saying that the average person exerts substantially less energy per day than even our luxurious Ancient Greeks did. Lives are much easier.
Another interesting thing is also not all of the Ancient Greeks you know were living lives of luxury, even by standards of their time. Socrates was born to a stonemason, served in the military, and lived his later life in voluntary poverty - offering up 100 drachmae as a punishment for the allegations that would lead to his execution. 100 drachmae was 1/5th of his entire life's wealth. For some scale, an unskilled worker would earn around 1 drachma a day, a skilled worker would earn around 5 drachma a day. He was executed at age 71, still in extremely good health.
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And yeah, on the boiling - I was stating that they did on occasion genuinely purify their water. However, the sniff/taste test was the norm with boiling the occasional exception.
That right there could be your reason. The human body was not designed to be stagnant. I read recently that the whole reason for the evolutionary development of brains in both animals and humans is to facilitate complex movement. Several studies done throughout the decades show a correlation between greater physical activity and better academic/learning results. The ancient greeks also believed there was a connection between improving the body and improving the mind.
Some say Socrates supported himself via few slaves who would run small farm or something of the sort. I don't know if it is true
The original "they lived short" refers to average lifespan, not to outliers.
They seem to be two different topics that are not in conflict with each other.
Moreover, lifestyles and lifespan of elite in the past would not be possible without slaves and peasants of back then economy. It would amount to comparing our selves with fictional past. If we include only long living people of the past then yes, they lived long.
If we include only people who had similar life to our, then yes, their lives are similar minus modern medicine.
When we say "people in the past lived shorter", then the claim needs to include all demographics to have any meaning.
If you could paraphrase your view or issue similarly clearly and concisely, it would be appreciated.
If you compare demographic of people who have enough food, good shelter, does not have to work hard physically, did not get sick or disabled until later age, did not died as children, had good enough hygiene (they bathed), did not get injured, could rest when sick, did not had childbirth (fist childbirth was risky) then you must end up with similar lifespan - human genetics does not changes that fast. We are same species.
I don't understand why that would be surprising or informative.
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I aimed to compare overall aims - average person to average person. So I could compare overall gains/looses.
Actually, the "pioneer", a bit earlier than Joseph Lister: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lister was Ignaz Semmelweis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis