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Comment by satya71 | Hacker News Reader

> That is, if you survived through childhood back then, you’d likely expect to live just about as long as everyone today.

Somehow I doubt that very much. I grew up in an emerging economy. Between the last few decades, life expectancy at birth went up from mid 50s to high 60s. Infant mortality went down, but not enough to cause the rise in life expectancy.

Anecdotally, I know most of my immediate family didn't make it past 70, but that's changing now. Relatively simple to treat chronic diseases such as cardiac issues and diabetes got them.

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I’m not arguing one way or another, these are all very broad claims in both directions.

But if you’re interested, that books also speculates that many such health issues, including the above, are relatively recent human ailments brought on by the modern diet facilitated by agriculture.

As a counterpoint, the industrial revolution drastically dropped urban life expectancies.

In visits to a number of developing countries I’ve made the same observation: driving from the wealthy, developed part where we were staying, out of the city and into the countryside I’d notice that the very worst poverty seemed to be not in the (technically poorest) countryside where the old, rural life still went on, but on the edges of modernity. The people at the edges of the city had left behind the benefits of the traditional way of life — being self-sustainable, ok nutrition, good air etc. — and were really only experiencing the drawbacks of modern life; few of the benefits.

It’s only a personal observation, but in my reading of history I wonder if the same pattern applies.

I had recently read a book about the 1918 flu, and it had made the point that these urban cities, at the time, required a constant influx of workers, just to replace those deceased.

So, to actually increase the labor pool, required a tremendous amount of human life.

I’ve read the same thing about Ancient Rome. It required a high influx of people because life expectancy in the city was so short.

I suspect the higher disease loads and lower fertility rate had a lot to do with that. But maybe not that things were better in rural villages either. Considering all of history rural areas had higher but the population wasn't increasing very fast. That is until you had mechanized farming.

I’d wonder if that’s orthogonal to the issue at hand though - Native American tribes experienced a glut of such diseases when they began transitioning onto anglo-Saxon style diets. We know that many communities across the world nowadays achieve advanced years by having simple diets and strong communities, and hunter-gatherers had that + rigorous exercise. As another comment on this page states, the typical hunter-gatherer was leagues more physically fit than the average person today.

I remember as a child an elderly relative of mine talked about how there were no restaurants in his day, and I just assumed that restaurants hadn't reached his part of the world until recently. It turns out some of the world's oldest restaurants are from his part of the world, and that he simply grew up during a very unstable time. Your experience may be similar to his.

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