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If you were in pre-neolithic times, at your age you would be dead already. Keep that in mind.
No way of knowing that.
Homo sapiens are designed physiologically to live in the 100 + year range. No different biology in the Paleolithic. Humans died younger from murder, war, accidents, congenital malformations, and infections. There was very little starvation. No heart disease. Very little evidence of cancers. There weren’t any non-communicable / lifestyle diseases. There was very little spread of contagious disease due to the nature of societies being small bands of usually well under 100 individuals - and bands and troops living far apart with little contact ever with other bands.
There is evidence of old age attainment. Some very old. Older than me. Evidence of communal care.
Anthropology is a terrifically interesting and informative science.
I think people figured out that Kamala was out for Kamala and no one else. She's just a tad too ambitious for many people's liking and she has quite a mixed record as Prosecutor and AG much of which is not flattering.
I think people figured out that Kamala was out for Kamala and no one else. She's just a tad too ambitious for many people's liking and she has quite a mixed record as Prosecutor and AG much of which is not flattering.
Childbirth, Mutt. Men used to go through a whole bunch of wives; the phrase "til death do us part" had a much more immediate meaning.
But yeah, with the appalling current state of health care in the US, <poor> people are still dying young of normally treatable conditions.
Well yes, childbirth death was huge. My list was intended to be conceptually representative - not complete ... and I was responding to bd’s assertion that I, a man, would be dead because of my age (in my 70’s). Child birth death would not be an issue for me.
The point I keep making re: the self-defeating nature of technology worship, is that utilizing the lessons learned through sciences and philosophies alike: we can live very productive, happy, healthy lives without technology.
Technology isn’t required to slash deaths in childbirth ... knowledge (that we have acquired) of the science of the process now (once again) supports safe midwifery at-home births with excellent safety records.
Simple wisdom such as: ‘don’t sh*t where you eat’, ‘wash hands and wounds’, ‘don’t eat lots of sweets’, ‘don’t overeat’ (even healthy foods), ‘don’t seek a lazy lifestyle (full of labor-saving devices), ‘easier and smarter and safer to cooperate than engage in warfare’, etc etc etc ... go a very long way in moving the average lifespan from 40 to 80.
Homo sapiens are designed physiologically to live in the 100 + year range. No different biology in the Paleolithic. Humans died younger from murder, war, accidents, congenital malformations, and infections. There was very little starvation. No heart disease. Very little evidence of cancers. There weren’t any non-communicable / lifestyle diseases. There was very little spread of contagious disease due to the nature of societies being small bands of usually well under 100 individuals - and bands and troops living far apart with little contact ever with other bands.
There is evidence of old age attainment. Some very old. Older than me. Evidence of communal care.
Anthropology is a terrifically interesting and informative science.
Keep that in mind.
Average life expectancy in Paleolithic was 35 so the chances of you being alive would slim to none. Human beings are not physiologically designed to live to 100 years old. If they were we wouldn't be fertile at the age of 15.
Average life expectancy in Paleolithic was 35 so the chances of you being alive would slim to none. Human beings are not physiologically designed to live to 100 years old. If they were we wouldn't be fertile at the age of 15.
You disappoint me here. I thought you were sensible with math.
What is the average of 65 and 5? Ans: 35
You do understand what I just did and why, right?
Average Paleo lifespan has exactly nothing to do with physiological design and potential.
Quote:
So what were the mortality patterns of prehistoric humans? From studying the remains of Paleolithic cultures and the life patterns of modern hunter-gatherers, researchers have concluded that human mortality fit to a U-shaped curve. Infancy and childhood were dangerous, but if you survived to 15, you could expect a reasonable lifespan: mortality rates started to increase again at around 40, doubling at 60 and again at 70. Gurven and Kaplan found that the modal (most common) age of death for hunter-gatherers who survived past 15 was 72. Taking out the infant mortality rate, Stephen Guyenet found that the average lifespan of one Inuit group was 43.5, with 25% of the population living past 60.
I can go on at length. But I’ll spare you.
As to potential lifespan by analysis of physiology?
Quote:
Last October, scientists made a splash when they determined that on average, people can only live for about 115 years. That was the magic age at which the human body and brain just petered out; it wasn’t designed to chug along much longer than that, they said.
That conclusion, published in the journal Nature, sparked hot debate among longevity researchers. Some felt the results vindicated what they felt to be the case, while others took issue with pinpointing a limit—and such a specific one, at that.
Now, in the new issue of Nature, the editors invited scientists who criticized the original authors’ methods to lay out their arguments for why there isn’t necessarily a limit to human aging. In the five resulting critiques, researchers tease apart the original authors’ methods, noting that they made assumptions that weren’t warranted and overreached in their conclusions. (The researchers who concluded that human lifespan maxes out at 115 years stand by their findings, and they responded to each of the current authors’ criticisms.)
Oh, and as for “fertility at 15” and menopause (at between 40 and 50)
Quote:
... Reproduction and Population Growth
This argument is not simply a set of statistics derived from studies on modern hunter-gatherers and extrapolated to the Paleolithic on the assumption that living conditions would be essentially similar. It also has a basis in human biology, specifically reproductive biology. Assuming that a Paleolithic woman wanted to maximize her baby’s chance for survival, she probably would have breastfed it for at least 2 years. This means that children would have been spaced at least 3 years apart: 2 years of breastfeeding plus 9 months of pregnancy. Studies on modern hunter-gatherers show women reaching menarche at an average age of 16, and giving birth to their first child around 19 (Hoggan uses 13, but this age is common only among modern industrial societies, where increased food intake and better nutrition have been steadily lowering the age of menarche since the 19th century. The average age at menarche for modern hunter-gatherers seems a much more accurate estimation for a Paleolithic woman). This means that the average woman would have Child 1 at 19, Child 2 at 22, and Child 3 at 25 – and then, according to the “cavemen died young” theory, she would die. But this is a completely unsustainable population pattern. Statistically, if 30-40% of children died in infancy, at least one of these children would die no matter what the mother did. Say that child is Child 1. The woman is now left with 2 children, but if she dies when Child 3 is a newborn, Child 3 will never get the benefits of her breast milk and nurture, and is therefore very unlikely to survive. Child 2 might stand a chance of living to adulthood, but if only one child per woman survived to reproduce, the human population would quickly die out.
Moreover, a woman very possibly might have not become pregnant with each successive child as soon as she was finished breastfeeding the last one. She may have chosen not to have sex, or a scarcity of food might have triggered her body into starvation mode, shutting down her reproductive system and suppressing fertility. If a woman only managed to bear 2 children before age 25, the population model gets even more dismal.
...
evolutionary biology presents another obstacle in the form of menopause. Nothing evolves without some purpose. Humans would not randomly start to grow horns or to see in the ultraviolet spectrum without some pressing environmental need for those features. Likewise, we wouldn’t have evolved to go through menopause unless it brought some evolutionary advantage. The “grandmother hypothesis” proposes that older women, who are more likely to die in childbirth and have babies with birth defects, provide more benefit to their family group by investing their time and energy in the children they already have. Menopause protects older women from pregnancies they can’t physically handle, so that they can continue to support their offspring and ensure the survival of their genetic line. But menopause never would have evolved if women in the Paleolithic were dying at 25: there would be no evolutionary pressure for a change that occurs between 40 and 50.
You disappoint me here. I thought you were sensible with math.
What is the average of 65 and 5? Ans: 35
You do understand what I just did and why, right?
Dude... no. I pulled up the life expectancy tables from the CDC popped it into excel. I'm going to use Hispanic Males & Females as an example (didn't even know I grabbed that initially, but it's the first one in the PDF and I'm not typing in anything else). You can find all the data here in case you want to follow along or look at different groups/years.:
So now we have the distribution of deaths per 100,000 people. What you will notice is two things. The sum of all the deaths at 100 = 95,499. So there is still about 4.5% of the population living to 100 years old so almost 2 SD's is described by the data in the chart. The next thing that should be immediately apparent is that the sum of all deaths at 85 is 51,414 (approximately half). This is the approximate median life expectancy for the population because that means that 51,414 people died before 75 and 48,586 died after 85. FYI, actual life expectancy at birth for the data set is 82. So the rough estimate is pretty good!
Now let's make a nifty graph of this data to explain why your initial math is flawed.
So as you can tell the distribution of this data is exceptionally left skewed. Your simple math of taking the average between 5 and 65 to come up with an average of life expectancy of 35 is completely erroneous because you are assuming that the number of deaths each year is a standard normal distribution. Clearly, it's not. Instead let's look at the life expectancy compared to the longest expected person living in the sample (life expectancy for someone at 100 in the data is 2.7 years so lets use 103) . So that's 82/103 = 0.80. That means if the median life expectancy is 82 and basically 99.99 of the population dies by 103 we can extrapolate that to a median life expectancy of 35. That means that life expectancy for paleolithic humans of 35 would imply 99.99% of the population would be dead by 44 if it has a similar distribution.
That means 3 standard distributions is 9 and someone aged 65 would be 21 above that. While obviously not impossible and I don't know the distribution of life expectancy for people that were dead thousands of years ago, it's certainly not probably.
Bottom line, you would be dead. Statistics is fascinating too.
Dude... no. I pulled up the life expectancy tables from the CDC popped it into excel. I'm going to use Hispanic Males & Females as an example (didn't even know I grabbed that initially, but it's the first one in the PDF and I'm not typing in anything else). You can find all the data here in case you want to follow along or look at different groups/years.:
So now we have the distribution of deaths per 100,000 people. What you will notice is two things. The sum of all the deaths at 100 = 95,499. So there is still about 4.5% of the population living to 100 years old so almost 2 SD's is described by the data in the chart. The next thing that should be immediately apparent is that the sum of all deaths at 85 is 51,414 (approximately half). This is the approximate median life expectancy for the population because that means that 51,414 people died before 75 and 48,586 died after 85. FYI, actual life expectancy at birth for the data set is 82. So the rough estimate is pretty good!
Now let's make a nifty graph of this data to explain why your initial math is flawed.
So as you can tell the distribution of this data is exceptionally left skewed. Your simple math of taking the average between 5 and 65 to come up with an average of life expectancy of 35 is completely erroneous because you are assuming that the number of deaths each year is a standard normal distribution. Clearly, it's not. Instead let's look at the life expectancy compared to the longest expected person living in the sample (life expectancy for someone at 100 in the data is 2.7 years so lets use 103) . So that's 82/103 = 0.80. That means if the median life expectancy is 82 and basically 99.99 of the population dies by 103 we can extrapolate that to a median life expectancy of 35. That means that life expectancy for paleolithic humans of 35 would imply 99.99% of the population would be dead by 44 if it has a similar distribution.
That means 3 standard distributions is 9 and someone aged 65 would be 21 above that. While obviously not impossible and I don't know the distribution of life expectancy for people that were dead thousands of years ago, it's certainly not probably.
Bottom line, you would be dead. Statistics is fascinating too.
You guys have the most interesting and educational disagreements I’ve ever seen.
Bravo.
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