Random Thoughts

[Angrboda]

“There is a basic distinction between life expectancy and life span,” says Stanford University historian Walter Scheidel, a leading scholar of ancient Roman demography. “The life span of humans – opposed to life expectancy, which is a statistical construct – hasn’t really changed much at all, as far as I can tell.”

Life expectancy is an average. If you have two children, and one dies before their first birthday but the other lives to the age of 70, their average life expectancy is 35.

That’s mathematically correct – and it certainly tells us something about the circumstances in which the children were raised. But it doesn’t give us the full picture. It also becomes especially problematic when looking at eras, or in regions, where there are high levels of infant mortality. Most of human history has been blighted by poor survival rates among children, and that continues in various countries today.

This averaging-out, however, is why it’s commonly said that ancient Greeks and Romans, for example, lived to just 30 or 35. But was that really the case for people who survived the fragile period of childhood, and did it mean that a 35-year-old was truly considered ‘old’?

(BBC News)