From what I’ve seen, it’s in realty mostly due to less wars and pandemics, as well as decreased child mortality. Take those away, and people 5 centuries ago lived roughly as long as today.
Seems like the amount of things we die from increased to match what we’re able to cure, so that we roughly always die at the same age.
In many cities you can see that the lifespan increases with the average household income of the neighbourhood, and if you look at say, Monaco, one of the richest per-capita cities, the average life expectancy is 85 for men and 93 for women, over 20 years longer than the average European scholar.
An intentionally simple example of how dramatic it is:
Ten people, with 20% of them dying in childhood. Then reduce that to just one dying in childhood.
80, 75, 70, 65, 65, 60, 50, 40, 2, 1 = 50.8 avg
Now drop the childhood deaths down to just one.
80, 75, 70, 65, 65, 60, 60, 50, 40, 1 = 56.6
You gained 5.8 years on life expectancy from cutting the rate in half. Now take us from 1650 childhood mortality rates, to affluent modern nations where it's eg 5 deaths per 1000 live births in a nation like Canada (and that's down by 75% from 20 per 1000, 50 years ago). I can only imagine how high the rate was 400 years ago, it would absolutely tank the average in an epic way.
Bill Gates for example routinely claims in interviews / discussions that there has been a massive gain in life expectancy (technically correct) and he'll claim that broadly (mostly false), dropping context on the fact that it's heavily caused by childhood mortality figures plunging. I've seen him do that numerous times over the years (usually he gets agitated when someone challenges him, moves into sarcastic mode, and points out the huge gains for the average person on life expectancy, which is partially bunk). It's a common point of intellectual dishonesty in the scientific & health establishment, because they want to pretend the life expectancy gains for adults have been far greater than they really have been (for their own self-interested reasons). I suspected the parent comment was riffing on that aspect, where it's a pushed point of quasi propaganda that life expectancy has soared for everyone.
Modern medicine helps to extend life expectancy but often those last 10+ years are miserable clinging to life whereas in the past once you got, for example, a chronic heart disease you would not survive very long. The healthy life expectancy in the past can only be a guess but probably not that considerably lower for certain classes.
At 30, in the period they consider expected age of death was in the 60-70 range.
Now it's in the high 80s among ALL europeans in the region they consider, which seems like a pretty big difference.
"Seems like the amount of things we die from increased to match what we’re able to cure"
This is always going to be approximately true, unless we end up living forever somehow.
Plato: 80
Archimedes: 75
Marcus Aurelius: 58
Ptolemy: 84
Aristotle: 62
Socrates: 71
Seneca: 92
Epicurus: 71
That's surely going to be a huge source of bias, because obviously people who lived longer were more likely to have done enough to be remembered
The original claim is about how long the average person lives. It is not about oldest people we have noted in history.
Modern medicine is a miracle and we're too jaded.
Then they die a few days later.
Maybe with some notion of natural aging, life expectancy is quite similar. But chances of getting there are way higher now.
A bit depressing that these lazy, swaggy, wrong hot takes are so often upvoted.
You firstly say that improved life expectancy isn't due to science, then you say that two of the three main reasons for improved life expectancy are pandemics and childhood mortality.
Those two statements are inconsistent. Medical science is one of the main reasons why pandemics and childhood mortality are less of a problem. Germ theory of disease, vaccines, therapeutics, etc.
"we roughly always die at the same age."
Figure 4 shows life expectancy among elite men conditional on surviving until 30 was 57-63 for the first few centuries in the sample - irrespective of whether it was a war/non-war period or a period with a specific plague.
Nowadays it is much higher than this (late 70s?) for a much larger cross section of people (not just elite individuals).
Good nutrition was similarly common in many areas historically even without scientific understanding of nutrition.
Both of these long pre-date according resembling the scientific method of germ theory. We’ve known that dirty water makes you sick and how to filter it for so long that the first example of a functioning sewer system I know of is prehistoric[1]. And clean water was transported over hundreds of miles through Roman aqueducts. They didn’t do that for no reason.
[1] Mohenji-Daro https://indusrivervalleytechnology.weebly.com/the-sewer-syst....
There's a big difference between water that is nice to drink and water that doesn't contain harmful pathogens, and cities that had piped water for centuries stopped killing their inhabitants from water-borne infections when scientists figured out germs existed and could be killed
Also, Roman aqueduct water had minimal lead contamination due to the high flow rate, unfortunately they used lead for a huge range of different things like cups which got lead onto people’s mouth and hands while eating etc.
Is there an easy way to confirm that these improvements are independent of the progress of science?
What are your sources? And how do you remove the indirect influences of wars (less food, etc.) that might last for many decades from your data?
By the way, the average life span of a 30-year old man in England 500 years ago was around 50 years. It is now over 70.
It's just that we're less likely to get eaten by predators or to die from wounds or disease when compared to our ancestors, while our ancestors didn't have to worry about plane crashes or traffic accidents (well, not to the extent we do anyway).
I don't know where this "in the Middle Ages you were considered old folk by the age of 30" myth comes from, but it has no right to exist. It's the history equivalent of the tongue map. Wrong but so widespread that even teachers believe it sometimes.