Timeline for Did people in ancient times, who survived childhood and were not killed in wars, have roughly the same chance to reach old age as contemporary people?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
15 events
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| Aug 16, 2020 at 16:10 | comment | added | cbeleites | @David42: there are more tricky ones, e.g. deaths caused by work accidents. And what about a perfectly natural wound infection after a work accident? | |
| May 15, 2020 at 14:31 | comment | added | David42 | I would say that addressing the professor's assertion requires us to exclude all causes of premature death. I would define "premature" as "not reasonably attributable to old age". A death from influenza at 50 is tricky to qualify, but surely we have to exclude deaths in childbirth or due to bleeding. | |
| Apr 25, 2018 at 18:27 | comment | added | 1006a | I think your numbers for women are off. A letter in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine responding to Rowbotham and Clayton has substantially different numbers, at least for women in England and Wales (an increase of over fifteen years from 1900 to 1989, and twice that since 1480). That makes sense, since pregnancy and especially childbirth posed such an incredible risk of death prior to advances like antibiotics and basic hygiene for doctors/midwives. | |
| Apr 17, 2018 at 18:32 | comment | added | gaazkam | @KonradRudolph The second column...OK that line of argumentation may hold some water, BUT! (1) What about violent deaths, I suppose they might also be taken into account; (2) Further from this article: "The following information is derived from the 1961 Encyclopædia Britannica and other sources, some with questionable accuracy"; (3) what are those "some of the referenced publications", I hope you remember which publications did you take your number from and so can cite it here? | |
| Apr 17, 2018 at 18:08 | comment | added | Konrad Rudolph | @gaazkam I think it was. Anyway, don’t just read the second column in the table; right next to it there’s a number for life expectancy at older age. My 50s number doesn’t come from there, though (you’ll see that the number listed there is 47.5, for children aged ≥ 10); it comes from some of the referenced publications. Anyway, that table alone is enough to at least contradict the claims in this answer. | |
| Apr 17, 2018 at 17:52 | comment | added | gaazkam | @KonradRudolph, citation needed; Which WPedia article do you mean? That one: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over_time ? That table excplicitely mentions it takes into account infant mortality. | |
| Apr 17, 2018 at 17:49 | comment | added | PoloHoleSet | Would going to see a doctor/barber and having them bleed you for the flu be considered a violent death, statistically? | |
| Apr 17, 2018 at 16:05 | comment | added | Konrad Rudolph | Unfortunately only consulting a single source is very misleading on this issue. You’ve been misled, your source (and the answer) is wrong (hence downvote, sorry). I don’t have time to correct this now but the Wikipedia article is a good starting point. tl;dr: in Roman times, almost nobody lived long past 50 (the median is somewhere in the 50s, not 72). A 70-year-old would have been ancient. An 80-year-old legendary. Not non-existent, but odd enough to be notable. | |
| Apr 17, 2018 at 3:38 | comment | added | days of love iff good genes | @GEdgar: Good point, I've added a bit on that. | |
| Apr 17, 2018 at 3:38 | history | edited | days of love iff good genes | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 16, 2018 at 23:54 | comment | added | GEdgar | This data is for men. What about women, however? I would guess that death in childbirth was much more common in the past than in the present day. | |
| Apr 16, 2018 at 20:07 | comment | added | JasonR | I would think that modern medicine has upped the life expectancy of older people in the past few decades. The privilege caveat would still apply of course. | |
| Apr 16, 2018 at 18:15 | history | edited | days of love iff good genes | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 16, 2018 at 18:06 | history | edited | days of love iff good genes | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 16, 2018 at 17:55 | history | answered | days of love iff good genes | CC BY-SA 3.0 |