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Comment by burke | Hacker News Reader

I mean the average lifespan in the year 1000 was about 31, so we’re doing at least a few things right.

From what I've read, if you filter out children under 5 in that statistic people lived into their early 60's pretty regularly.

High child mortality is still a bad thing.

Not saying it's not, but the implication that everyone was dying at 30 isn't true.

That's not what's implied. Only thing that was said was that the average lifespan was 31. Could be any curve under that number, but it's bad however you cut it.

Yes. Stats about average lifetimes are quite misleading & useless until you filter out child mortality.

Isn't that average lifespan? There was a lot of death either in childbirth or during early childhood years. If you filter that data out a bit, adults lived a more comparable age. Still not as good as today, but not 31.

>Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy during the 12th–19th centuries was approximately 55 years

So still worse by whole decades than now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#:~:text=Excl....

Yes, although lots of places (mainly in Africa) have average life spans in the 50s.

https://www.worlddata.info/life-expectancy.php#by-population

TBH I'm not sure the argument that only women and those under 5 were dying young in large numbers is a great rebuttal to the idea that we were better off in 1023.

I wasn't arguing that. Of course medical tech is better now. I was saying 31 is just not a good number to claim for that time period.

Lifespans got worse before they got better. Better to reference 10,000BC than 1023AD, and that’s not so clear.

all the correct observations about averages aside, quantity!=quality

that's dominated by child mortality; people who survived to teen years typically lived much longer than 31

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