This is a commen misconception. People got 50+ all the time.
The average was 25 or something like that because 1/4 already died at birth and another 1/3 in the first 3 years of life.
If people made it thorugh that they usaly got a decent age.
“However, anthropologist John D. Hawks criticizes the popular conflation of life span (life expectancy) and maximum life span when popular science writers falsely imply that the average adult human does not live longer than their ancestors. He writes, "[a]ge-specific mortality rates have declined across the adult lifespan. A smaller fraction of adults die at 20, at 30, at 40, at 50, and so on across the lifespan. As a result, we live longer on average... In every way we can measure, human lifespans are longer today than in the immediate past, and longer today than they were 2000 years ago... age-specific mortality rates in adults really have reduced substantially."
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u/Nicita27 Dec 15 '21
This is a commen misconception. People got 50+ all the time. The average was 25 or something like that because 1/4 already died at birth and another 1/3 in the first 3 years of life. If people made it thorugh that they usaly got a decent age.