Three years ago after I turned thirty, I remember some wise-ass asking me how it felt to know that I’d outlived most people from the Middle Ages. To which I replied, “technically, I did that when I turned two years old.” The statistic that people from the Middle Ages and Ancient Era only lived to be around 30 is grossly misrepresented, and I feel like more effort needs to be put into fixing that misunderstanding, because far too many historical, cultural, and sociological theories are based around it.
While technically it’s a true statistic, what’s so rarely brought up is the fact that the reason for this was the very high infant mortality rate among past cultures globally. When two-thirds of the global human population dies before their first birthday, it tends to skew the life-expectancy averages southwards. Any cursory historical research will turn up dozens of figures who lived into their 50s, 60s, or 70s, and even many slaves, peasants, and laborers who had shorter life expectancies tended to live well into their 40s. I mean, Caesar was 56 and still kicking ass when he was assassinated, Charlemagne was in his late 60s, Alexander the Great was almost 33 and every text ever written about him says that he died young. I hate it when something gets accepted as common knowledge without proper context, and I hope if nothing else this post gets a few people to rethink their understanding of what they know about history.
Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.
Most of the Psalms date to Solomon’s reign, which was around 3000 years ago; the more recent are from the Babylonian Captivity which was around 2500 years ago. While many died much younger of disease or infections (not to mention war and murder) people even in the Bronze age lived a good long time if they made it past age 5 or so.
Just tacking this on as another common one, I’m not sure about medieval times but in the 17th century the average age people got married at was actually a year or so OLDER than the average western age today.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1yTJF4u