Stayin ' Alive

Last Sunday I showed you all those characters in Genesis who lived 900 years, and I noted that is about 20 times what folks could actually expect back then. The story is a bit more complicated than that.Here ' s a useful resource from Oxford University about historic life expectancy. (You might enjoy exploring the site which has all sorts of other information about humans and the planet.) This only goes back to about 1850, when reasonably complete records are available, but in fact the story in 1750 was not markedly different than it was in 1750 BC.Life expectancy at birth, historically, has been around 37 year or so. However, this is a bit misleading if you don ' t know how it ' s calculated. It ' s the mean expected age at death assuming that the current death rate by age cohort remains the same throughout your future. So if one person dies in infancy and the other lives to be 74, that gives you the 37 year life expectancy. Infant mortality was indeed much higher in the past than it is now; but that ' s not the whole story. Life expectancy for a one-year-old was indeed the approximately 45 years that I stated. People who died in infancy, obviously, would not have made it into the genealogy. On the other hand, some people did live into what we would today consider old age.As it turns out, thatmostly meant privileged men. Here we see that the kings of Judah, Greek philosophers, Christian church fathers and other elite men of ancient times who made it to age 15 could expect to...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs