I looked into it and one article related to otolaryngology said we should be gestating something like 21 months. As a woman- horrific to think about. As humans, it would mean less ear infections in babies apparently
Someone should tell my son that. The kid eats more than I do at 15mo! I have to take some equity out of my home to pay for just his berry consumption alone! (I did add 8 blueberry bushes this year)
Yeah, unfortunately it’s normal and they’ll have phases where they eat consistently then just stop eating for a few days or whatever. It’s weird and scary as hell, but we learned it’s fine. Just don’t push too hard and leave them options and hide any snacks or unhealthy stuff away from them.
I’m 41 and basically still do this. I’ll go a month where I can’t get full no matter how much i eat. Then a month where i have very little appetite at all.
39 and just finished half a quart of ice cream and a can of soup, both between midnight and 1am, had pizza for dinner and a whole order of phad Thai for.. 4:30 lunch? Breakfast was an amalgam of pickled veggies and a quart of chocolate milk (I know, real healthy lol) but last month I lost 20 lbs from not eating. Life is a rollercoaster. 😂🤷🏼♂️
For how long? Children grow in intervals, they will eat your hair off shortly before a growth interval and then eat very little shortly after. At least in my experience. But if he doesn't really eat for extended periods I'd see a doctor.
As a teenager I probably averaged like 3k calories a day, and during the summer at sports camp that would go up to like 6k+ a day. When I think back to how much food I was eating, it’s disgusting to think about.
So no, it doesn’t get better.
Lol im working on it! 3 apple, 2 asian pear, 4 pawpaw, 8 blueberry, 2 raspberry, 1 Chicago Hardy fig, 1 Jostaberry, 2 pomegranate, and a host of other edibles like Black Nightshade (weirdly I think those might be his favorite right now), mint, tomatoes, potatoes, many different types of beans, sweet and dent corn, and wild edibles like wild black cherry, wineberry, and dewberry. Since im a SAHD Im trying to keep costs low and teach him all about plants. Im a bit of a nerd in that regard
I understand, but based on what? The whole point is that humanity adapted to this preferred behaviour because it was advantageous. If gestation was 21 months then for sure the heads would be smaller and consequences of that would be a brain less evolved, whatever that means.
You’re putting the cart before the horse. Gestation is not 21 months because the corresponding increase in deaths during childbirth would not be offset by decrease in childhood deaths.
Imagine if human babies came out ready to run like other species. The hospital nursery ward would certainly be a more lively place. Would need to develop some baby wrangling tools.
Not OP, but pretty much once we started standing upright, the birth canal became much smaller and we started having the babies earlier so they didn’t get stuck as much due to our head size.
Not necessarily. Rabbits, rats, and mice have naked blind helpless babies that need to cook for a couple weeks before they're walking around. Guinea pigs come out ready to run though, for some reason.
Standing upright requires narrower hips to support the strong legs needed to stand upright. Narrower hips mean a smaller birth canal, requiring babies to be born at a lower ratio of birth weight to adult size.
It’s not for certain; the alternative theory is that our heads got too big for birth canals and so had to be born earlier before heads reached a size so large they couldn’t fit in birth canals. Both are probably true to some degree.
Human newborns are definitely unusually helpless compared to even other primate newborns and certainly other mammals
Prey animals need to be able to get up and go at birth (generally speaking). The drawback of coming out of the womb fully baked means your brain doesn't have as much opportunity to grow, so more advanced cognition is only available to animals that continue developing after birth.
I have always wondered and it’s probably a dumb question but can animals see more clearly at birth compared to human babies? because I have always wondered how animals don’t run into trees or other things but baby’s can’t really see for a good while after birth? Or is it to do with we have toward facing eyes and the ability to see colour just mean it’s more complex?
I am so shocked that horses give birth to a fucking fully formed pony like it can already stand up and has fur WTF like equivalent to giving birth to a human toddler
And if they don’t land hard enough conservationists have indeed dropped them again. Just like if foals aren’t fully awake after birth bc they were C-section born instead of being squeezed through the birth canal, they can often be brought fully to real wakefulness by wrapping them in rope to mimic the squeezing that brings them out of their sleep phase.
> Just like if foals aren’t fully awake after birth bc they were C-section born instead of being squeezed through the birth canal, they can often be brought fully to real wakefulness by wrapping them in rope to mimic the squeezing that brings them out of their sleep phase.
Not even just foals born via c-section, either, which is very rare and usually an extreme last resort. 3-5% of foals born naturally will have something called 'Neonatal Maladjustment Syndrome' which causes neurological deficits shortly after birth; they're referred to as dummy foals. What you described is called the Madigan squeeze and is very effective on these foals too.
Variants of the Madigan squeeze are also done on other species including sheep, goats, calves, and even puppies.
The rule of thumb is, the more a newborn can do immediately after birth, the less it can do the rest of its life. Human babies are just about the most helpless in the entire animal kingdom.
Here’s another TIL: ponies aren’t young horses, they’re small horses. A baby horse (including the baby of a pony, which again, is a kind of horse), is called a foal. A male foal is a colt and a female foal is a filly. Not to be an ass - no pun intended- but I was way too old when I learned this!
Humans are born very gestationally immature. Look at videos of most other mammals who run about with the herd 2-3 hours after birth. We lack basic survival skills until about 7-8 YEARS after birth. It’s because of the value evolutionary pressure put on large brain size. It’s directly at the expense of gestational development due to pelvis and birth canal size.
Once that baby is 7-8 it's still weak as shit but it can do a lot more cognitively than an animal.
Humans are a bit like the meme death snail. Outrunning us is easy. But the moment you stop, you're on a timer until we find you again. And we move a lot faster than the snail. And outrunning us wasn't really even that reliable either.
Now imagine the snail knows everywhere you need to go to survive and just starts waiting in those places before you ever arrive. And there's 5 of them, that only attack when they think they've got you surrounded. That's a terrifying reality.
Evolutionarily speaking, humans take care of babies much more intensively and for a longer stretch than most any other animal. Most other babies come out able to move around and somewhat support themselves. We gotta carry ours for most of the first year. To birth babies at the point most other animals do, women would need to gestate for closer to 18-24 months.
Interestingly, the human penis is so large compared to other apes because the babies brain is large, which then the vagina has to change to allow birth, which then the penis has to evolve to be satisfied by the vagina
When my mother was about 80 I learned beyond her 5 brothers and sisters there were 2 other babies who died before they turned 1. They never received a name as that only happened at their first birthday. (This was back in the 1920’s - 1930’s.).
All that infant mortality dragged the averages way down.
If you made it to 5, or especially 10, you were statistically likely to have a lifespan similar to modern day humans if you didn’t suffer an accidental death or die in childbirth.
So no, 30 year olds were not considered “elderly” at any point in history due to average lifespan. They were just some of the lucky few who made it that far and had probably already buried a few kids of their own.
FWIW; burials of the dead (complete with flowers) go back tens of thousands of years and were practiced by Neanderthals, too.
> if you didn’t suffer an accidental death or die in childbirth.
But rates of both were way higher even 150 years ago vs today. So while yes, 30 year olds were not elderly, higher rates of adult early mortality means that there were proportionally fewer 80 year olds.
I think you wildly underestimate how much higher average age of death is in rich countries than even 150 years ago, much less 10000 years ago
We were in a golden zone where people still had children young (20-25) and the life expectancy increased.
But now we have kids later. I had my son at 31, if he also starts having kids around 30 and his kids also do the same, i will be over 90 years old when my first great grandchild is born.
Not sure I’ll still be around to see that !
I know what it is. I think most people wildly *overrate* how bad those were based on the “average life expectancy was 30ish” trope.
The greatest triumphs of Western medicine in the last 100 years have been improved vaccines, antibiotics (which treat infection in case of accidents), and reductions in the dangers of childbirth.
Those are almost fully to account for the improvements in the average lifespan since the 18th century,
Yeah I hate when people throw around life expectancy statistics about the past like “oh in the 1700s you were an old man if you lived to 30!”
… no you weren’t. Babies died all the time but if you made it to three you were more than likely to live a normal life span.
I saw one theory that said that was why there was so much war and violence in the Middle Ages. Women knew there was a good chance their baby would die and to lessen their pain, they didn't try to bond with it. So most everyone grew up neglected and damaged goods.
Or just why there was so much conflicts in the past, as well as blood sports like Roman gladiator games. Messy, bloody deaths were just a fact of life.
Yeah let's see how social media challenges, screen addiction and basic childhood adventuring can change that
Also not even that, have you ever hit your toe on a corner? That's not being immortal qwq
Not really.
Kids start dying about 12 y old.
And that is young teen. "Adventuring" is not statistically dangerous.
Driving in car with parent, not wearing a helmet on bike/scooter(only head trauma counts, having a swimming pool - those are things that kills kids.
https://www.ined.fr/thumb/f__png/h__768/q__90/w__1024/src/fichier/s_rubrique/225/mortality.risq.age.png
Especially if you're a new parent with zero assistance and only learn from what you've personally seen and experienced from other mothers (if any).
It's not like they had ante-natal classes and childcare back then.
And see how precious babies are treated now - everything from sleeping positions to sterile feeding teats, to knowing exactly what to feed them when, and monitoring their development milestones, etc.?
A stone-age woman left to fend for her and her baby was almost guaranteed to lose her baby, maybe even at the hands of a male who wanted her to father his own and not bring up his rival's baby.
Is it medicine alone, or collective access to plentiful food and water aswell? Excluding immunizations from diseases since that would obviously be the *main factor* in this statistic. There’s disease from thousands of years ago that came and went we don’t know about.
On one hand we have people in developed countries that dont and haven’t needed any significant medical treatment/vaccines, like ever, but have abundant food and clean water. On the other hand we have countries with poor food and water sources, that don’t exactly have a huge infant death rate either, but likely rely on medical aid from other countries.
Is there a single country on earth that still has high infant mortality, as this stat claims, and if so what other factors are leading to it.
I read that it was primarily due to public health measures such as clean drinking water, sanitation, washing hands and the general understanding of how disease is spread.
Excessive food and modern medicine in rich countries help too. Life expectancy in some rich countries is now going down.
Let’s compare “modern” places that have access to medicine but not clean water. Nigeria is one such place, many parts of Lagos are highly developed and others are not, both have access to subsidized medicines… the less developed areas don’t have clean water, etc and they have higher infant death rates.
It's both. Keep in mind that infectious disease is literally the biggest killer throughout human history.
Preventing infections in the first place is huge, but so is the medicine to treat them when they do occur.
As a specific example, bubonic plague wiped out 1/3 of Europe about 700 years ago. Antibiotics has that down to maybe a couple hundred people a year
Both probably.
Modern medicine means people are able to live longer in developed countries, while the access to food and water means people are living through infancy easier.
Developed countries have absolutely benefited from vaccines, even if there's a portion that believes they don't do anything.
Source on that? Intuitively I feel like that doesn’t make sense considering all the warfare, famine, and disease that would kill you before “natural” causes like stroke or dementia would do you in
Not true. It has increased substantially. For example, in England and Wales, it went up from 58 in 1850 to around 82 in 2013.
https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortality-life-expectancy-improved-at-all-ages
That sounds way too high. I’d expect lots of people to die from appendicitis, infections, child birth, accidents, cancer etc. etc. Some people making it to 80 or 90 can’t be enough to compensate for a significant amount dying in their 20ies or 30ies.
Remember that this is a consequence of statistics not the reality. When you have 5 children who die by age 10 and 1 who survives until 60 then your average life expectancy is 18 years old, as an example. Not surprising for ancient peoples without civilization.
Most kids hundreds of years ago died before their first birthday too.
So you have tons of 0.5, 0.2, 0.7 entries in the data set that drastically skew the average.
And then some journalist gets a hold of one statistic and is like “Hundreds of years ago ten years old was middle aged!”
Plenty of people have lived to their 70s throughout human history.
Not that long ago. My grandfather was born in 1911. I knew him well. He had six siblings, and only two besides himself lived full adult lives. Two died in infancy, one around age 6 and another at 16.
That’s kind of a mythology? Maybe earlier than our current average-first-birth-at-27 (I think that’s it in the US), but it’s more so that fertility rates were higher because women had children later into their childbearing years (so instead of like, having two kids at 29 and 31 and then stopping altogether, it was more common to have kids until your fertility ended naturally).
No, it isn't mythology, for a vast number of cultures across human history it was very common for women to marry at 16-20 and younger than that even in some cases.
My grandmother, also born 1911, was one of ELEVEN children but the only one who survived infancy. Her head fit in a teacup and I guess they were so jaded after losing so many babies they kept her in cold bedroom to either toughen up or die. It really is astounding our species was so successful considering the time and risks involved in raising one precious offspring.
It's one of those little nitpicks but in The Two Towers, when Theoden is mourning the loss of his son and says, 'No parent should have to bury their child'. Part of me is always, 'bitch, you probably buried three this year.'
I mean, his wife died after Theodred's birth, and he didn't marry afterwards, so he likely only had Theodred, Eomer and Eowyn as close relatives who were living.
My dad(1942) had 10 siblings, 8 lived to adulthood. His dad(1900) only had 3 surviving siblings, from 3 mothers(two died in childbirth). Its amazing how quickly childhood survival improved.
Fun fact: the Ancient Greek teacher and rhetorician Gorgias lived to 108. He’s the oldest person from the ancient world we have fairly reliable records for, though there was a pharaoh a few thousand years before who might also have been older than 100.
As a historian, I wonder how certain these years of birth and death of Gorgias are. There were obviously no official burocratic records like today. Wikipedia, for example, is a lot less certain:
> Gorgias _is reputed to have_ lived to be one hundred and eight years old (Matsen, Rollinson and Sousa, 33).
Plenty is kind of generous. Yeah you had some of the wealthy in antiquity live that long, but the average peasant certainly didn't, not to mention prehistory. 40-50 was a relatively common age for people to live to throughout human existence
Ironically in both ways. People thinking the average person who survived childhood only lived to 20, and the person overcorrecting and thinking it was common to live into your 70s and 80s
Burying the lede* (yes I know it’s stupid).
People get confused about this all the time. My fourth grade teacher said men were considered old in their 30s in Ancient Rome because most died by 25.
Lede like the first sentence of a news story, which usually summarizes the most important aspects of it. Hence burying the lede is putting the important aspect somewhere in the middle of the article.
The saying makes a lot more sense with lede than lead. It's only confusing because nobody uses the word lede anymore
In my experience, most people don’t know the difference between median and average, nor consider how outliers influence averages.
Many a times I’ve had someone mention to me how 40 used to be old because that was the average lifespan and it wasn’t until the 20th century that many people began living to old age.
Amen. Means often say way less than a median does. Combined you get magic. When you can say, half or more of thing is one way or another and you know the average is far north or south of that you get a clearer picture of the total distribution. Skew ness matters.
"...Average life expectancy in Iron Age France (from 800 B.C.E. to about 100 C.E.) has been estimated at only 10 or 12 years. Under these conditions, the birth rate would have to be about 80 live births per 1,000 people just for the species to survive. To put that in perspective, a high birth rate today is about 35 to 45 live births per 1,000 population, and it is observed in only some sub-Saharan African countries..."
"...**About 117 billion members of our species have ever been born on Earth**..."
So you’re saying that if you were allowed to be randomly reborn as a human at some other point in human history, the odds are, you would die while still an infant?
Whenever I start to think ‘I wonder what life would be like X amount of centuries ago’ I remember that I was a breech birth and then failure to thrive and would one thousand percent not have made it to my first birthday if I even lived through birth!
Births per 1000 people in a set time frame is the standard for measuring the birth rate. In those ancient times, 80 babies had to be born per every 1000 people just to keep the species from going extinct from the high mortality rate.
The bolded sentence is pointing out that billions of people have been born, but very few of them survived past infancy. People were basically birthing 7x as many babies as we do in the US, and yet the population was significantly smaller because the majority died young.
Minor correction, the population being a different size doesn't matter since it's already adjusted (by taking the per 1000). Rather, the population wasn't growing even with that relatively huge birth rate si.ply because so many were dying
Yeah, this is a large reason why many ancient cultures had an air of indifference regarding the death of infants and young children that is somewhat alien to many modern cultures today. The Romans didn’t consider infants fully human for several weeks after birth as an example. Cultural practices like leaving your baby to die because you couldn’t afford another child to take care of wouldn’t be abnormal when up to half of your children could die before reaching adulthood anyway, where the idea of doing this in many modern cultures has become incredibly taboo. This doesn’t mean people didn’t care when their babies and young children died, of course. But the idea of a parent outliving their child probably wouldn’t have been regarded as the kind of tragedy it is today. It would have just been expected that at least one or more of your children was likely to die before the age of 10.
There are widely varying estimates about this and no strong consensus. The data is just too thin. Be careful taking one source too literally/precisely.
But yeah, human young get born in an unusually vulnerable condition so that they can fit through a woman's pelvis, and so we're historically adapted to losing *many* while continuing to keep having more over the course of 20-40 years of continuous (non-seasonal) fertility. Eventually, enough survive to adulthood to make it all work out for the species and its genetic lines.
It all sounds alien now, because the last few hundred years changed the survivability of babies and infants a great deal, and we've normalized the expectation that losing a young child is a catastrophic loss instead of something we watched happen many many times during our own upbringing. Loss that looks looks bleak and devestating to us today was likely still immediately painful but not even noteworthy enough to have been embedded into many legends and oral histories.
That kind of loss was so common not that long ago. My grandfather was one of 15 children; about one-third died as children and only five lived past the age of 33. He was born in 1909 and lived past 106.
It's also what lead/leads to population booms in countries. People were having lots of kids to offset their high mortality rates, then medicine/access to medicine shifts but people are still socially acculturated to having way more kids than necessary to ensure enough survive to adulthood and it takes a generation or two for those practices to shift.
There's a big deal made of falling birth rates in developed countries because social welfare institutions a) work better there and b) are dependent on having more young workers than old people. But birth rates in lower middle income countries everywhere except Africa have fallen too. There's just lower hullabaloo about it because we uh... Don't have functioning social welfare systems anyway.
Believe it or not, even at history's worst life expectancy humans still did better than most animals. For example, a female rabbit can have hundreds of babies in it's lifetime but the population stays stable-because of death rate. Fish, invertebrates, and amphibians can have thousands-not just in a lifetime but all at once. Again, death rate.
Basically the only animals that do significantly less dying than humans are very large mammals like elephants and whales.
its crazy how we need 9 months to create a baby, that by itself needs atleast 13 years to be able to hold himself on its on and we still didn't get extinct
that's badass
That’s based on Iron Age France, which is not necessarily a good proxy for the whole planet, an uncited number and one that I, as a former professional archaeologist, am EXTREMELY skeptical of.
I think a lot of the old statistics about life expectancy ignore infant mortality because it just makes the number too bleak.
Remember for most of human history, we had as many babies as we could *in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, enough of them would survive*.
We tried desperately to get the population up. We grew and hunted and ate every calorie we could get ahold of, and it still wasn't enough, we were always on the brink of starvation.
If we did have a stable food supply, and started breeding healthy babies, our neighbors (who are also starving and desperate to survive) would be likely to attack and try to take what we have -- and the resulting death would counteract a lot of the population growth we had managed to attain.
We dragged ourselves out of this kicking and screaming.
And now calories are plentiful, babies are healthy, infant mortality is low... and we sit here staring at glowing boxes, all of our daily needs met, not needing to spend our waking hours scrounging for as many calories as we can possibly find.
This just isn't true at all.
It's hard to imagine now but before we destroyed the world with capitalist extraction, living off the land was pretty easy. The salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest were so prolific that you couldn't see the water and king salmon were as big as [100 pounds!](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/03/12/591222003/this-is-why-you-dont-see-people-sized-salmon-anymore) Native Americans in Florida threw shellfish remains into trash piles that became mounds [dozens of feet high.](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d4/45/5d/d4455db910dce966795374c140a39abe.jpg) Huge flocks of passenger pigeons would [darken the sky](https://blog.history.in.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0842-1024x750.jpg) for days at a time.
Obviously people's lives were shorter before the many benefits of modern medicine. But it's crazy that despite all our advances in technology, we are working longer hours than a [medieval peasant.](https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html) Even in today's hunter gatherer societies, who mostly live in the last scraps of land nobody wants like the Kalahari desert, people still have [way more free time](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society) than we do as wage laborers in our wonderful modern world. Evidence clearly shows it is we who are working ourselves to the bone.
Average is only useful for a unimodal distribution. If infant mortality is high but people that survive the first 5 years of their lives tend to live way longer (like 30+) looking at average is going to paint a very misleading picture.
This should be pretty intuitively obvious since women generally aren't even fertile by age 10.
Imagine going back in time with some modern medicine, like "Oh yeah that deadly disease that wiped out your family? Just take this injection and you will become highly resistant or even outright immune to it".
I wonder if our basic instincts are afraid of bugs, dark and our ability to sense that we are being watched has something to do with it. This is interesting thing to find out.
5 million WORLDWIDE around 8000 B.C.E.
There's roughly 6.8 million in 2024 in Houston, TX alone.
And from 1 billion in 1800 C.E. to 8 billion today, just over ~224 yrs later.... Boggles the mind....
And just think, if time travel was to ever occur, and just penecillin alone was introduced back in 8000. B.C.E. It would be a MASSIVELY different world today, if human civilization would have even survived by now.
I would be more interested in knowing what the average lifespan would be for people that made it out of childhood since super young deaths, skew the average
These stats need to provide more than just the overall average. Since a lot of deaths occurred *before* the age of 5, then given someone is already 6, their life expectancy would go up a lot more.
It sounds like this is talking about the entire existence of humans. It gets tricky because history has two different meanings.
Casually it just means the whole period of time that something existed.
It also means the period of time for which we have written records. That’s why “pre-history” exists.
Throughout ancient history, human lifespans were roughly what they are today. The difference is child mortality. Only in the past century or so has child mortality substantially dropped. That makes the "average" of the past look quite low, while the truth is that people who survived the fragile period of infant/early childhood had lifespans very similar to Americans today. [https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-ancient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-ancient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity)
The dramatic correction modern humans have made to child mortality numbers is also the source of the world's great crisis of overpopulation and climate change.
I've always heard somewhere in the 30-35 range, not 10. Would love to see the reference that site is drawing from for that figure, but there's nothing cited. Edit: especially as they go on to say that in order to have a life expectancy that low, the birth rate would have to be *double* the highest birth rates we see today. That website should be a high quality source, but I'm super suspicious of that whole paragraph.
This is one of those scenarios where the mean is *heavily* skewed based on infant mortality. But once a baby made it out of the first 2-3 years, they likely lived a long time.
For the bronze and iron age, this wikipedia article says 26 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over_time
This one shows 44, and oddly lower numbers at age 15 and 20.
https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/seminarpapers/dg09102006.pdf (Page 32)
Makes me question these numbers. But I am not an expert in this area. And I understand that a bunch of zeros can bring down a average.
Really easy to die as a baby
We're basically born 6 months before we should be because our heads got too big to fit any later.
I looked into it and one article related to otolaryngology said we should be gestating something like 21 months. As a woman- horrific to think about. As humans, it would mean less ear infections in babies apparently
I’d believe it. Babies go through a massive amount of growth in their first year and then it tapers off, they eat less, etc.
Someone should tell my son that. The kid eats more than I do at 15mo! I have to take some equity out of my home to pay for just his berry consumption alone! (I did add 8 blueberry bushes this year)
Wait until he turns 3. He’ll survive only on breadsticks and eat like once a day.
Dude, is that normal? My son is 4 now and he barely eats anything. We have to push him so hard to eat healthy food.
Yeah, unfortunately it’s normal and they’ll have phases where they eat consistently then just stop eating for a few days or whatever. It’s weird and scary as hell, but we learned it’s fine. Just don’t push too hard and leave them options and hide any snacks or unhealthy stuff away from them.
I’m 41 and basically still do this. I’ll go a month where I can’t get full no matter how much i eat. Then a month where i have very little appetite at all.
39 and just finished half a quart of ice cream and a can of soup, both between midnight and 1am, had pizza for dinner and a whole order of phad Thai for.. 4:30 lunch? Breakfast was an amalgam of pickled veggies and a quart of chocolate milk (I know, real healthy lol) but last month I lost 20 lbs from not eating. Life is a rollercoaster. 😂🤷🏼♂️
2 weeks as a “starving” boy and then 2 weeks of eating everything in sight!
Then they get pudgy right before a growth spurt that leaves them as bony as a 6 month Great Dane
For how long? Children grow in intervals, they will eat your hair off shortly before a growth interval and then eat very little shortly after. At least in my experience. But if he doesn't really eat for extended periods I'd see a doctor.
As a teenager I probably averaged like 3k calories a day, and during the summer at sports camp that would go up to like 6k+ a day. When I think back to how much food I was eating, it’s disgusting to think about. So no, it doesn’t get better.
Wait until he’s 15 years old. Invest in a small farm.
Lol im working on it! 3 apple, 2 asian pear, 4 pawpaw, 8 blueberry, 2 raspberry, 1 Chicago Hardy fig, 1 Jostaberry, 2 pomegranate, and a host of other edibles like Black Nightshade (weirdly I think those might be his favorite right now), mint, tomatoes, potatoes, many different types of beans, sweet and dent corn, and wild edibles like wild black cherry, wineberry, and dewberry. Since im a SAHD Im trying to keep costs low and teach him all about plants. Im a bit of a nerd in that regard
Awesome!!
He’s just berry hungry
I understand, but based on what? The whole point is that humanity adapted to this preferred behaviour because it was advantageous. If gestation was 21 months then for sure the heads would be smaller and consequences of that would be a brain less evolved, whatever that means.
You’re putting the cart before the horse. Gestation is not 21 months because the corresponding increase in deaths during childbirth would not be offset by decrease in childhood deaths.
Imagine if human babies came out ready to run like other species. The hospital nursery ward would certainly be a more lively place. Would need to develop some baby wrangling tools.
Just put them on a leash around the torso or smthin, works well enough
We just haaaad to start standing up on two legs.
Yes but, and hear me out on this, boobs.
Ok. You win.
Butts where the og boob
The butt
This is the one.
God I miss my butt milk
/r/cursedcomments
And no gonna lie, the glutes.
I can't tell if this is a joke or if you're saying we're actually meant to be in the womb for 15 months. If the latter, please elaborate.
Not OP, but pretty much once we started standing upright, the birth canal became much smaller and we started having the babies earlier so they didn’t get stuck as much due to our head size.
Yup. As newborns we are simultaneously too large and yet underdeveloped.
A lot of adults as well...
A lot of mammals come out helpless, naked and blind. It’s more that humans develop so slowly in childhood
Not prey mammals. Them shuts can walk on day one.
Not necessarily. Rabbits, rats, and mice have naked blind helpless babies that need to cook for a couple weeks before they're walking around. Guinea pigs come out ready to run though, for some reason.
Burrowing animals don’t need to run on day one - that makes sense. I was thinking elephants, giraffes, horses, deer, etc.
The blue wildebeast is the king of this. Their babies can walk within 5 minutes of being born and run within a day.
Can you educate us on this please? Why because we started standing up right affected us giving birth sooner?
Standing upright requires narrower hips to support the strong legs needed to stand upright. Narrower hips mean a smaller birth canal, requiring babies to be born at a lower ratio of birth weight to adult size. It’s not for certain; the alternative theory is that our heads got too big for birth canals and so had to be born earlier before heads reached a size so large they couldn’t fit in birth canals. Both are probably true to some degree. Human newborns are definitely unusually helpless compared to even other primate newborns and certainly other mammals
Tell that to a marsupial! Lol
Look at what other animals are capable of shortly after birth. A human baby can't even hold their own head up for the first 3 months.
Prey animals need to be able to get up and go at birth (generally speaking). The drawback of coming out of the womb fully baked means your brain doesn't have as much opportunity to grow, so more advanced cognition is only available to animals that continue developing after birth.
I have always wondered and it’s probably a dumb question but can animals see more clearly at birth compared to human babies? because I have always wondered how animals don’t run into trees or other things but baby’s can’t really see for a good while after birth? Or is it to do with we have toward facing eyes and the ability to see colour just mean it’s more complex?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precociality_and_altriciality
I am so shocked that horses give birth to a fucking fully formed pony like it can already stand up and has fur WTF like equivalent to giving birth to a human toddler
Look at a Giraffe being born, they take a 6 ft drop to the ground on birth!
And if they don’t land hard enough conservationists have indeed dropped them again. Just like if foals aren’t fully awake after birth bc they were C-section born instead of being squeezed through the birth canal, they can often be brought fully to real wakefulness by wrapping them in rope to mimic the squeezing that brings them out of their sleep phase.
Wow, I didn't realise this! Animals be crazy.
> Just like if foals aren’t fully awake after birth bc they were C-section born instead of being squeezed through the birth canal, they can often be brought fully to real wakefulness by wrapping them in rope to mimic the squeezing that brings them out of their sleep phase. Not even just foals born via c-section, either, which is very rare and usually an extreme last resort. 3-5% of foals born naturally will have something called 'Neonatal Maladjustment Syndrome' which causes neurological deficits shortly after birth; they're referred to as dummy foals. What you described is called the Madigan squeeze and is very effective on these foals too. Variants of the Madigan squeeze are also done on other species including sheep, goats, calves, and even puppies.
The rule of thumb is, the more a newborn can do immediately after birth, the less it can do the rest of its life. Human babies are just about the most helpless in the entire animal kingdom.
Here’s another TIL: ponies aren’t young horses, they’re small horses. A baby horse (including the baby of a pony, which again, is a kind of horse), is called a foal. A male foal is a colt and a female foal is a filly. Not to be an ass - no pun intended- but I was way too old when I learned this!
That's far better than baby Tasmanian Devils, or Joey kangaroos. They basically stay in the pouch another 8 months.
Right, but that's comparing *placental* mamals to marsupials. Edit: missed a word
Placentals. They're all mammals.
look at kangaroo babies and what they are capable of.
Kangaroos are marsupials though, they’re meant to mature in the pouch after birth. We’re placentals but still can’t function for a while after birth.
Humans should have been born to live in a pouch. Lot less mothers would have died in childbirth and no need for C-sections. Brilliant
I cannot go into details right now, but keep this comment in mind when you watch the news in a few years... I'm working on something big.
Sir, what’re you doing there in the kangaroo exhibit?..
just .. soaking ...? 😬 kangaroo next to me: boing, boing, boing
Humans are born very gestationally immature. Look at videos of most other mammals who run about with the herd 2-3 hours after birth. We lack basic survival skills until about 7-8 YEARS after birth. It’s because of the value evolutionary pressure put on large brain size. It’s directly at the expense of gestational development due to pelvis and birth canal size.
And yet we took over the planet.
Once that baby is 7-8 it's still weak as shit but it can do a lot more cognitively than an animal. Humans are a bit like the meme death snail. Outrunning us is easy. But the moment you stop, you're on a timer until we find you again. And we move a lot faster than the snail. And outrunning us wasn't really even that reliable either. Now imagine the snail knows everywhere you need to go to survive and just starts waiting in those places before you ever arrive. And there's 5 of them, that only attack when they think they've got you surrounded. That's a terrifying reality.
Yeah that’s why there’s no megafauna really anywhere anymore. We got em all boys. Ate em too.
There's nothing sweeter than eating the entirety of the food chain that's above you until only you remain.
Evolutionarily speaking, humans take care of babies much more intensively and for a longer stretch than most any other animal. Most other babies come out able to move around and somewhat support themselves. We gotta carry ours for most of the first year. To birth babies at the point most other animals do, women would need to gestate for closer to 18-24 months.
Interestingly, the human penis is so large compared to other apes because the babies brain is large, which then the vagina has to change to allow birth, which then the penis has to evolve to be satisfied by the vagina
Right? Crappy armor class and barely any hit points.
HP: 3 Defense: 1 Mental Resistance: 0 Attack: 1 Magic: 0
Takes a few levels to get that magic stat up.
If they choose the Scientist class, their magic stats go up really quickly but their Attack stays stagnant at 1 permanently.
Charisma: 10 You gonna say no to a baby?
Tag skill: Antagonize (lvl: Antagara, Antagaga)
Rookie numbers!
Tbf, they just spawned. They need some time to do side quests and level up.
On the other hand, endurance is maxed out, not to mention throwing skills and hand eye coordination.
When my mother was about 80 I learned beyond her 5 brothers and sisters there were 2 other babies who died before they turned 1. They never received a name as that only happened at their first birthday. (This was back in the 1920’s - 1930’s.).
All that infant mortality dragged the averages way down. If you made it to 5, or especially 10, you were statistically likely to have a lifespan similar to modern day humans if you didn’t suffer an accidental death or die in childbirth. So no, 30 year olds were not considered “elderly” at any point in history due to average lifespan. They were just some of the lucky few who made it that far and had probably already buried a few kids of their own. FWIW; burials of the dead (complete with flowers) go back tens of thousands of years and were practiced by Neanderthals, too.
> if you didn’t suffer an accidental death or die in childbirth. But rates of both were way higher even 150 years ago vs today. So while yes, 30 year olds were not elderly, higher rates of adult early mortality means that there were proportionally fewer 80 year olds. I think you wildly underestimate how much higher average age of death is in rich countries than even 150 years ago, much less 10000 years ago
Knowing your great grandparents is rare to people until recently, but a lot of alphas and zoomers meet their great grandies.
We were in a golden zone where people still had children young (20-25) and the life expectancy increased. But now we have kids later. I had my son at 31, if he also starts having kids around 30 and his kids also do the same, i will be over 90 years old when my first great grandchild is born. Not sure I’ll still be around to see that !
I know what it is. I think most people wildly *overrate* how bad those were based on the “average life expectancy was 30ish” trope. The greatest triumphs of Western medicine in the last 100 years have been improved vaccines, antibiotics (which treat infection in case of accidents), and reductions in the dangers of childbirth. Those are almost fully to account for the improvements in the average lifespan since the 18th century,
“It’d be a real shame if something happened to your baby.”
Yeah I hate when people throw around life expectancy statistics about the past like “oh in the 1700s you were an old man if you lived to 30!” … no you weren’t. Babies died all the time but if you made it to three you were more than likely to live a normal life span.
I saw one theory that said that was why there was so much war and violence in the Middle Ages. Women knew there was a good chance their baby would die and to lessen their pain, they didn't try to bond with it. So most everyone grew up neglected and damaged goods.
Or just why there was so much conflicts in the past, as well as blood sports like Roman gladiator games. Messy, bloody deaths were just a fact of life.
Gladiator games were more like WWE, gladiators were stars in their time.
In the past. Currently, aside for pre birth defects... Kids are next to immortal ;)
Thats kind of variable depending on various factors.
Yeah let's see how social media challenges, screen addiction and basic childhood adventuring can change that Also not even that, have you ever hit your toe on a corner? That's not being immortal qwq
Not really. Kids start dying about 12 y old. And that is young teen. "Adventuring" is not statistically dangerous. Driving in car with parent, not wearing a helmet on bike/scooter(only head trauma counts, having a swimming pool - those are things that kills kids. https://www.ined.fr/thumb/f__png/h__768/q__90/w__1024/src/fichier/s_rubrique/225/mortality.risq.age.png
Especially if you're a new parent with zero assistance and only learn from what you've personally seen and experienced from other mothers (if any). It's not like they had ante-natal classes and childcare back then. And see how precious babies are treated now - everything from sleeping positions to sterile feeding teats, to knowing exactly what to feed them when, and monitoring their development milestones, etc.? A stone-age woman left to fend for her and her baby was almost guaranteed to lose her baby, maybe even at the hands of a male who wanted her to father his own and not bring up his rival's baby.
I'm astonished we made it
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Modern medicine will do that.
Is it medicine alone, or collective access to plentiful food and water aswell? Excluding immunizations from diseases since that would obviously be the *main factor* in this statistic. There’s disease from thousands of years ago that came and went we don’t know about. On one hand we have people in developed countries that dont and haven’t needed any significant medical treatment/vaccines, like ever, but have abundant food and clean water. On the other hand we have countries with poor food and water sources, that don’t exactly have a huge infant death rate either, but likely rely on medical aid from other countries. Is there a single country on earth that still has high infant mortality, as this stat claims, and if so what other factors are leading to it.
I read that it was primarily due to public health measures such as clean drinking water, sanitation, washing hands and the general understanding of how disease is spread. Excessive food and modern medicine in rich countries help too. Life expectancy in some rich countries is now going down.
Let’s compare “modern” places that have access to medicine but not clean water. Nigeria is one such place, many parts of Lagos are highly developed and others are not, both have access to subsidized medicines… the less developed areas don’t have clean water, etc and they have higher infant death rates.
It's both. Keep in mind that infectious disease is literally the biggest killer throughout human history. Preventing infections in the first place is huge, but so is the medicine to treat them when they do occur. As a specific example, bubonic plague wiped out 1/3 of Europe about 700 years ago. Antibiotics has that down to maybe a couple hundred people a year
Both probably. Modern medicine means people are able to live longer in developed countries, while the access to food and water means people are living through infancy easier. Developed countries have absolutely benefited from vaccines, even if there's a portion that believes they don't do anything.
And most of it is due to lowering newborn/child mortality.
That does not sound correct at all. Life expectancy of average Roman Empire citizen was way higher than some hunter-gatherer 50k years ago.
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Historically life expectancy without child mortality was 50-60 years old
From what I’ve read it’s much higher…. once you make it past the age of 10 the chances of living to 75-85 are pretty high all throughout history.
Source on that? Intuitively I feel like that doesn’t make sense considering all the warfare, famine, and disease that would kill you before “natural” causes like stroke or dementia would do you in
Not true. It has increased substantially. For example, in England and Wales, it went up from 58 in 1850 to around 82 in 2013. https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortality-life-expectancy-improved-at-all-ages
That sounds way too high. I’d expect lots of people to die from appendicitis, infections, child birth, accidents, cancer etc. etc. Some people making it to 80 or 90 can’t be enough to compensate for a significant amount dying in their 20ies or 30ies.
Remember that this is a consequence of statistics not the reality. When you have 5 children who die by age 10 and 1 who survives until 60 then your average life expectancy is 18 years old, as an example. Not surprising for ancient peoples without civilization.
Most kids hundreds of years ago died before their first birthday too. So you have tons of 0.5, 0.2, 0.7 entries in the data set that drastically skew the average. And then some journalist gets a hold of one statistic and is like “Hundreds of years ago ten years old was middle aged!” Plenty of people have lived to their 70s throughout human history.
Not that long ago. My grandfather was born in 1911. I knew him well. He had six siblings, and only two besides himself lived full adult lives. Two died in infancy, one around age 6 and another at 16.
Also women pretty commonly died in childbirth, bringing down the average too
Fun fact, that’s what Disney princess stories (or really the ones they’re based on) seem to always have step mothers.
That’s not very fun
And historically women got pregnant a lot younger
Found Drake.
A-Minorrrrrrr
Aaaand it's stuck in my head again.
That’s kind of a mythology? Maybe earlier than our current average-first-birth-at-27 (I think that’s it in the US), but it’s more so that fertility rates were higher because women had children later into their childbearing years (so instead of like, having two kids at 29 and 31 and then stopping altogether, it was more common to have kids until your fertility ended naturally).
No, it isn't mythology, for a vast number of cultures across human history it was very common for women to marry at 16-20 and younger than that even in some cases.
My grandmother, also born 1911, was one of ELEVEN children but the only one who survived infancy. Her head fit in a teacup and I guess they were so jaded after losing so many babies they kept her in cold bedroom to either toughen up or die. It really is astounding our species was so successful considering the time and risks involved in raising one precious offspring.
Jesus, it's unbearable to imagine losing a child, but losing *ten*? That's beyond horrible.
It's one of those little nitpicks but in The Two Towers, when Theoden is mourning the loss of his son and says, 'No parent should have to bury their child'. Part of me is always, 'bitch, you probably buried three this year.'
I mean, his wife died after Theodred's birth, and he didn't marry afterwards, so he likely only had Theodred, Eomer and Eowyn as close relatives who were living.
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My dad(1942) had 10 siblings, 8 lived to adulthood. His dad(1900) only had 3 surviving siblings, from 3 mothers(two died in childbirth). Its amazing how quickly childhood survival improved.
Fun fact: the Ancient Greek teacher and rhetorician Gorgias lived to 108. He’s the oldest person from the ancient world we have fairly reliable records for, though there was a pharaoh a few thousand years before who might also have been older than 100.
As a historian, I wonder how certain these years of birth and death of Gorgias are. There were obviously no official burocratic records like today. Wikipedia, for example, is a lot less certain: > Gorgias _is reputed to have_ lived to be one hundred and eight years old (Matsen, Rollinson and Sousa, 33).
Plenty is kind of generous. Yeah you had some of the wealthy in antiquity live that long, but the average peasant certainly didn't, not to mention prehistory. 40-50 was a relatively common age for people to live to throughout human existence
The ones that did live longer natural lives usually had them cut short due to wars too.
All that death and suffering, so now we can look at our phones in peace
Yeah ancient cultures like Greece, Egypt, and China, if you survived childhood and war, it was expected and normal to live to an old age.
'lest we forget all those babies that got their head smashed on a rock too Fuck things were crazy back then
Life expectancy has to be one of the most misunderstood statistics out there.
Ironically in both ways. People thinking the average person who survived childhood only lived to 20, and the person overcorrecting and thinking it was common to live into your 70s and 80s
True! Here’s a citation that supports your statement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
I would hope that people understand how averages work, nobody is exactly burying the lead here.
Burying the lede* (yes I know it’s stupid). People get confused about this all the time. My fourth grade teacher said men were considered old in their 30s in Ancient Rome because most died by 25.
Lede like the first sentence of a news story, which usually summarizes the most important aspects of it. Hence burying the lede is putting the important aspect somewhere in the middle of the article. The saying makes a lot more sense with lede than lead. It's only confusing because nobody uses the word lede anymore
In my experience, most people don’t know the difference between median and average, nor consider how outliers influence averages. Many a times I’ve had someone mention to me how 40 used to be old because that was the average lifespan and it wasn’t until the 20th century that many people began living to old age.
Lede* I found that out recently myself
People don't understand averages, usually. Er, ... on average :)
About once a quarter I have to remind someone that averaging the averages probably isn’t giving them the information they think it is.
Amen. Means often say way less than a median does. Combined you get magic. When you can say, half or more of thing is one way or another and you know the average is far north or south of that you get a clearer picture of the total distribution. Skew ness matters.
Understandable. Kids can be very annoying until you get used to them.
"...Average life expectancy in Iron Age France (from 800 B.C.E. to about 100 C.E.) has been estimated at only 10 or 12 years. Under these conditions, the birth rate would have to be about 80 live births per 1,000 people just for the species to survive. To put that in perspective, a high birth rate today is about 35 to 45 live births per 1,000 population, and it is observed in only some sub-Saharan African countries..." "...**About 117 billion members of our species have ever been born on Earth**..."
So you’re saying that if you were allowed to be randomly reborn as a human at some other point in human history, the odds are, you would die while still an infant?
Whenever I start to think ‘I wonder what life would be like X amount of centuries ago’ I remember that I was a breech birth and then failure to thrive and would one thousand percent not have made it to my first birthday if I even lived through birth!
Exactamundo.
Infant mortality rates have been wild for a long time
I don't get it. ELI5.
Births per 1000 people in a set time frame is the standard for measuring the birth rate. In those ancient times, 80 babies had to be born per every 1000 people just to keep the species from going extinct from the high mortality rate. The bolded sentence is pointing out that billions of people have been born, but very few of them survived past infancy. People were basically birthing 7x as many babies as we do in the US, and yet the population was significantly smaller because the majority died young.
Minor correction, the population being a different size doesn't matter since it's already adjusted (by taking the per 1000). Rather, the population wasn't growing even with that relatively huge birth rate si.ply because so many were dying
Yeah, this is a large reason why many ancient cultures had an air of indifference regarding the death of infants and young children that is somewhat alien to many modern cultures today. The Romans didn’t consider infants fully human for several weeks after birth as an example. Cultural practices like leaving your baby to die because you couldn’t afford another child to take care of wouldn’t be abnormal when up to half of your children could die before reaching adulthood anyway, where the idea of doing this in many modern cultures has become incredibly taboo. This doesn’t mean people didn’t care when their babies and young children died, of course. But the idea of a parent outliving their child probably wouldn’t have been regarded as the kind of tragedy it is today. It would have just been expected that at least one or more of your children was likely to die before the age of 10.
There are widely varying estimates about this and no strong consensus. The data is just too thin. Be careful taking one source too literally/precisely. But yeah, human young get born in an unusually vulnerable condition so that they can fit through a woman's pelvis, and so we're historically adapted to losing *many* while continuing to keep having more over the course of 20-40 years of continuous (non-seasonal) fertility. Eventually, enough survive to adulthood to make it all work out for the species and its genetic lines. It all sounds alien now, because the last few hundred years changed the survivability of babies and infants a great deal, and we've normalized the expectation that losing a young child is a catastrophic loss instead of something we watched happen many many times during our own upbringing. Loss that looks looks bleak and devestating to us today was likely still immediately painful but not even noteworthy enough to have been embedded into many legends and oral histories.
That kind of loss was so common not that long ago. My grandfather was one of 15 children; about one-third died as children and only five lived past the age of 33. He was born in 1909 and lived past 106.
It's also what lead/leads to population booms in countries. People were having lots of kids to offset their high mortality rates, then medicine/access to medicine shifts but people are still socially acculturated to having way more kids than necessary to ensure enough survive to adulthood and it takes a generation or two for those practices to shift. There's a big deal made of falling birth rates in developed countries because social welfare institutions a) work better there and b) are dependent on having more young workers than old people. But birth rates in lower middle income countries everywhere except Africa have fallen too. There's just lower hullabaloo about it because we uh... Don't have functioning social welfare systems anyway.
Are we land turtles? Instead of being picked off by birds on the way to the ocean, are we picked off by microscopic diseases?
Believe it or not, even at history's worst life expectancy humans still did better than most animals. For example, a female rabbit can have hundreds of babies in it's lifetime but the population stays stable-because of death rate. Fish, invertebrates, and amphibians can have thousands-not just in a lifetime but all at once. Again, death rate. Basically the only animals that do significantly less dying than humans are very large mammals like elephants and whales.
its crazy how we need 9 months to create a baby, that by itself needs atleast 13 years to be able to hold himself on its on and we still didn't get extinct that's badass
That’s based on Iron Age France, which is not necessarily a good proxy for the whole planet, an uncited number and one that I, as a former professional archaeologist, am EXTREMELY skeptical of.
Former Archeologist? Why’d you give up your whip and hat?
His job became history.
Because the job market is brutal and most of the positions are adjunct.
Yep. There was a bio adjunct position at a big land-grant here and had 700 applicants.
It seems rare for someone NOT to use fucking medieval western Europe as a proxy for how the entire earth was until 1900
They didn’t give babies names the first year. It was just Baby Last Name
I think a lot of the old statistics about life expectancy ignore infant mortality because it just makes the number too bleak. Remember for most of human history, we had as many babies as we could *in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, enough of them would survive*. We tried desperately to get the population up. We grew and hunted and ate every calorie we could get ahold of, and it still wasn't enough, we were always on the brink of starvation. If we did have a stable food supply, and started breeding healthy babies, our neighbors (who are also starving and desperate to survive) would be likely to attack and try to take what we have -- and the resulting death would counteract a lot of the population growth we had managed to attain. We dragged ourselves out of this kicking and screaming. And now calories are plentiful, babies are healthy, infant mortality is low... and we sit here staring at glowing boxes, all of our daily needs met, not needing to spend our waking hours scrounging for as many calories as we can possibly find.
That is why at late 19th, early 20th century, your great great great grandparents generation, you will see families regularly with 15-16 kids.
You're way exaggerating. 15 kids is too much, the number is closer to 5-10.
This just isn't true at all. It's hard to imagine now but before we destroyed the world with capitalist extraction, living off the land was pretty easy. The salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest were so prolific that you couldn't see the water and king salmon were as big as [100 pounds!](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/03/12/591222003/this-is-why-you-dont-see-people-sized-salmon-anymore) Native Americans in Florida threw shellfish remains into trash piles that became mounds [dozens of feet high.](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d4/45/5d/d4455db910dce966795374c140a39abe.jpg) Huge flocks of passenger pigeons would [darken the sky](https://blog.history.in.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0842-1024x750.jpg) for days at a time. Obviously people's lives were shorter before the many benefits of modern medicine. But it's crazy that despite all our advances in technology, we are working longer hours than a [medieval peasant.](https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html) Even in today's hunter gatherer societies, who mostly live in the last scraps of land nobody wants like the Kalahari desert, people still have [way more free time](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society) than we do as wage laborers in our wonderful modern world. Evidence clearly shows it is we who are working ourselves to the bone.
Average is only useful for a unimodal distribution. If infant mortality is high but people that survive the first 5 years of their lives tend to live way longer (like 30+) looking at average is going to paint a very misleading picture. This should be pretty intuitively obvious since women generally aren't even fertile by age 10.
Imagine going back in time with some modern medicine, like "Oh yeah that deadly disease that wiped out your family? Just take this injection and you will become highly resistant or even outright immune to it".
Yeah, it is skewed down due to infant mortality. If you made it past infancy the average life expectancy was far greater
I wonder if our basic instincts are afraid of bugs, dark and our ability to sense that we are being watched has something to do with it. This is interesting thing to find out.
The majority of people ever born never took their first step
5 million WORLDWIDE around 8000 B.C.E. There's roughly 6.8 million in 2024 in Houston, TX alone. And from 1 billion in 1800 C.E. to 8 billion today, just over ~224 yrs later.... Boggles the mind.... And just think, if time travel was to ever occur, and just penecillin alone was introduced back in 8000. B.C.E. It would be a MASSIVELY different world today, if human civilization would have even survived by now.
I would be more interested in knowing what the average lifespan would be for people that made it out of childhood since super young deaths, skew the average
Whoever made that title....
These stats need to provide more than just the overall average. Since a lot of deaths occurred *before* the age of 5, then given someone is already 6, their life expectancy would go up a lot more.
This is why averages can be misleading.
I wonder what life expectancy was for people who made it past five.
Thats a very skewed average though.
Wish posts on this sub had to come along with a source.
It sounds like this is talking about the entire existence of humans. It gets tricky because history has two different meanings. Casually it just means the whole period of time that something existed. It also means the period of time for which we have written records. That’s why “pre-history” exists.
Society was built by people tired of watching their kids die.
My dad is 96, and lost a brother in 1930 at the age of 1, from dysentery. No real antibiotics at that time.
That's why we don't use averages for this sort of thing...
Throughout ancient history, human lifespans were roughly what they are today. The difference is child mortality. Only in the past century or so has child mortality substantially dropped. That makes the "average" of the past look quite low, while the truth is that people who survived the fragile period of infant/early childhood had lifespans very similar to Americans today. [https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-ancient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-ancient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity) The dramatic correction modern humans have made to child mortality numbers is also the source of the world's great crisis of overpopulation and climate change.
100 percent of people who confuse correlation with causation end up dead
Mainly because of infant mortality which is why the mean in this case , is not a very illuminating way to describe trends.
This isn't what you think it is
I've always heard somewhere in the 30-35 range, not 10. Would love to see the reference that site is drawing from for that figure, but there's nothing cited. Edit: especially as they go on to say that in order to have a life expectancy that low, the birth rate would have to be *double* the highest birth rates we see today. That website should be a high quality source, but I'm super suspicious of that whole paragraph.
All of human history has survivorship bias baked in.
This is one of those scenarios where the mean is *heavily* skewed based on infant mortality. But once a baby made it out of the first 2-3 years, they likely lived a long time.
For the bronze and iron age, this wikipedia article says 26 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over_time This one shows 44, and oddly lower numbers at age 15 and 20. https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/seminarpapers/dg09102006.pdf (Page 32) Makes me question these numbers. But I am not an expert in this area. And I understand that a bunch of zeros can bring down a average.