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Comment by softfalcon | Hacker News Reader

These statistics regularly make it sound like everyone was dying off around 30.

In reality, it is due to infant mortality rates. Once you make it past a certain age (10-15 years) your life expectancy shoots up into the 40-60's easily. However, when you average the population out, those infant deaths tank the average life expectancy.

I'm not surprised they glossed over this, most researchers do, because they don't want to go into infantile deaths, disease spread during child birth, still births, etc.

Not only is it a complex topic, but it's fraught with political and religious ideology. When my history and anthropology professors started talking about it, certain folks of a particular religious bent almost immediately started trying to correct them about it.

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The guy in the video said "their lifespans would have only been around 35 years" which sounds not so much glossing over as being plain incorrect.

I am annoyed by these slips every time because they make it seem as if we live so much longer since hunter-gatherer times... Modern medicine reduced early age mortality, sure, but funny enough it did not do much to increase max lifespan (and especially healthy lifespan).

Ah, yeah, that sounds like it was indeed just incorrect.

To add to your comment about modern medicine. Keep in mind that when you isolate out infant mortality, you get an average life span of roughly 60-ish in ancient times.

Present day mortality is closer to 85+ for the G7 countries and 75+ for other fairly well developed countries. That's a 25 year increase! Given those statistics, I would say modern medicine is actually doing quite a bit to improve life expectancy into your golden years!

IMHO healthy life expectancy should be the thing which is discussed and referenced. Back then you’d likely just die if you were too sick to comfortably live.

>Not only is it a complex topic, but it's fraught with political and religious ideology. When my history and anthropology professors started talking about it, certain folks of a particular religious bent almost immediately started trying to correct them about it.

If you don't mind clarifying just a bit. What types of religious folks would get upset about a professor in a course (for a scientific discipline they presumably want to do well in no less) describing the very real history of terrible infant mortality across pretty much all premodern cultures and societies? Why would this even be a problem for them? Daily life in the past was known to be very harsh, even the bible itself (among other religious texts) alludes to that constantly.

I hope I don't regret asking, but I'm genuinely curious about the details here. What religious/political implications are there (in the US, I presume?) for babies and mothers dying a lot in the old times? I've never seen this discussion become polarized before.

As you probably already know, medical science was stifled by the Catholic church for many years. In some ways, some medical practices were more accepted in the Muslim empires of the day. This creates a ultimately pointless but still real "superiority argument" around medieval and ancient times for these faiths.

There can be an ideological bent to try and label Rome (and by relation Catholicism) as being unclean and ungodly because it does not protect its young. Or even more extreme, suggest that their children die regularly because they are godless and that history proved it.

I hope I don't need to explain why this is very much an extremist point of view, but I'll say so regardless so that HN mods or other folks don't label me as being political/religious here.

In my history class, a religious argument of "my children are more godly and history proves it by the deaths" broke out between a group of very devout Orthodox, some Catholic folks, and some Muslim folks. All of them were trying to use the infant mortality rate as proof of some or the other's faith of god in their children. It got very weird, very fast. The professor had to break up the argument.

This happened in Alberta, the "religious zealotry" capital of Canada. Lots of religious conservatism here.

Wow. Never thought of this angle, religion wasn't on my radar concerning this question. Just found it counter intuitive that we live longer but not that much longer... Medicine's great but we have ways to go in our understanding.

Yes, "average life expectancy" is just misleading noise; "life expectancy at N" (3<=N<=5) is what you want.

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