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>Humans today regular live well beyond our natural lifespans

Is this really so? My understanding is that humans in antiquity who survived childhood typically lived to what we would now consider retirement age.



You're correct; GP is wrong. Human normal lifespan is and has been about 70 years, once you account for early demise, especially from infant mortality -- https://www.sapiens.org/biology/human-lifespan-history/


A useful corrective, but perhaps also misleading. Humans didn't peacefully keel over at 60, let alone 30, that's true. And death before 20 was indeed so horrifyingly common that it couldn't help but bias the average hard. But mortality was higher at every age, be it from disease, injury, or childbirth. A person of the past would have understood a death at 40 or 50 to be young, but not all that unusual. Most people would know quite a few who died in that range.


Yup. Unfortunately “mean age of death” is most commonly known, but in reality many children died at birth, hence lower mean.


I think traditionally actuarial tables have always been based on given achieving the age of 5 years.




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