Most adults in our ancestral past lived to be about as old as people do in western industrialized nations today.
That sounds iffy to me. Sure, straight comparison of life expectancy at birth is heavily biased by child mortality. So let’s take life expectancy at, say, 25. Are you saying that in “ancestral past” if you made it to 25 you were likely to make it to 70-80? I strongly doubt that, if only for medical reasons. Lack of effective medicine including antibiotics, lack of understanding of public health issues leading to epidemics, parasite load, etc. Plus violence for men and childbirth for women were major risk factors.
Epidemics and parasite load may have been lower than you might think if the populations were more diffuse. Things spread better through a dense population jammed into a refugee camp than through a sparse population.
According to this if you made it to 15 your average life expectancy was around 54.
OK, let’s accept that 54 years number. A US 15-year-old male has the life expectancy of 15+62=77 years and a 15-year-old female -- 15+67=82 years (source). Take the average of 80, more or less.
So basically the life expectancy of a contemporary American 15-year-old is one and a half times larger than the life expectancy of a 15-year-old from a forager tribe. That’s not “about as old”. Besides, hunter-gatherers are known to be healthier than farmers.
That sounds iffy to me. Sure, straight comparison of life expectancy at birth is heavily biased by child mortality. So let’s take life expectancy at, say, 25. Are you saying that in “ancestral past” if you made it to 25 you were likely to make it to 70-80? I strongly doubt that, if only for medical reasons. Lack of effective medicine including antibiotics, lack of understanding of public health issues leading to epidemics, parasite load, etc. Plus violence for men and childbirth for women were major risk factors.
According to this if you made it to 15 your average life expectancy was around 54.
http://www.unm.edu/~hkaplan/KaplanHillLancasterHurtado_2000_LHEvolution.pdf
Epidemics and parasite load may have been lower than you might think if the populations were more diffuse. Things spread better through a dense population jammed into a refugee camp than through a sparse population.
OK, let’s accept that 54 years number. A US 15-year-old male has the life expectancy of 15+62=77 years and a 15-year-old female -- 15+67=82 years (source). Take the average of 80, more or less.
So basically the life expectancy of a contemporary American 15-year-old is one and a half times larger than the life expectancy of a 15-year-old from a forager tribe. That’s not “about as old”. Besides, hunter-gatherers are known to be healthier than farmers.