I saw a couple of survival curves hereand here which both seem to imply that few people lived past age 40 before agriculture. About 15-20% of births would survive to age 30 and about 5% would survive to age 40.
Is that considered accurate and a widely accepted hypothesis about living conditions in the stone age? Keep in mind I’m not talking about life expectancy at birth being 40, I’m talking about very few of the people who survived childhood being able to survive to 40. Half of people died in childhood, the majority of the rest died in their 20s and 30s. Life expectancy at birth in these situations (when factoring in childhood mortality) was probably 16 years or so.
I have heard that archaeologists tend to find older people (50+) when digging in stone age sites, but I have no cite for that just something I have read.
Anyway, are the charts above accurate for life for homo sapiens up until about 7000 years ago? About half would die until the mid teens, then the vast majority of those who survived childhood diseases would die in their 20s and 30s so that only 1 in 20 people survived to their 40th birthday?
If so, what killed the 20 and 30 something adults? Hunting accidents? Predators? Human violence? Famine? Accidents? Disease? All of the above? The curve seems fairly straight diagonally after childhood so I’m guessing some environmental hazards killed people at age 21 and 36 just as equally.
I can think of one situation in which a pre-agriculture civilization co-existed with one which could record such things:
Native Americans (hunter-gatherers) and European invaders (industrial).
There were Natives which made it past 40 - but how many of them did that?
It doesn’t help that many of these were warrior tribes, losing populations to raids and defenses.
The hunters of northern Canada - Cree, Inuit, etc. - were true hunter-gatherers, getting almost no food from planted crops. Similarly, most plains Indians followed the bison herds, rather than planting crops. The more southerly Indians of Canada, the Hurons, Mohawks, etc. were more agricultural than hunters. Same with the other tribes all the way down to the fully agricultural tribes of the southwest.
Yet, the nomadic tribes did have a tradition of elders. They would easily live past 40 - the elders were the repositories of important knowledge. The problem, of course, is that before horses came along in the 1500’s, moving someone elder and infirm would have been a problem.
However, consider that many debilitating diseases are lifestyle induced. Obesity, heart disease, diabetes, tuberculosis - all were relatively unknown in small isolated and barely subsistent societies.
Also remember that nothing has changed. We have the same life expectancy as thousands of years ago, unless we are unlucky to be killed by some accident or disease. They lucky hunter-gatherers would follow the same trajectory of life, having children up to about 40 and raising them, so definitely surviving to age 50 or 60. One of the arguments about why women have menopause is the mother and grandmother hypothesis. Women stop having children so they don’t die of the stress of childbirth at advanced ages while they still have children to raise from before menopause. Children need 10 to 20 years of being raised before they can survive, so the mother who stops at 40 can keep nurturing existing children. Once that is done, she is free to help her children raise their children, thereby helping to ensure her grandchildren survive.
Most statistics about life expectancy are badly skewed by the relatively high rate of infant mortality. Many children did not survive to age 5, so an average life expectancy of 40 means a lot of early deaths and a number of deaths well past 40.
However, this effect is often exagerated. Even though low life expectancy in the past is explained in a large part by childhood mortality, people who reached adulthood also didn’t live nearly as long as we do. The median age of death in France around the renaissace was…10. Half of people born died during infancy/childhood. However, life expectancy for people who reached 21 was still low, they would on average die in their mid 50 (and that’s for the nobility), with almost non-existent progresses over centuries. Both phenomenons resulted in those overall life expectancy figures of 25 or 30.
Life expectancy reached 60 for the French nobility only in the early 1800, and for the general population in the late 19th century (again, that’s for people reaching adulthood to begin with. Life expectancy in France including childhood/infancy deaths was still only 45 in 1900, with a 15% chance of dying in the first year of life).
People of former areas seem to have lived longer than they really did because those we have in mind are those who lived long enough to become famous in the first place. The would be philosopher who kicked the bucket at 30 while penning his second essay, or the bright officer who died of smallpox in his late 20s are forgotten. The guy who outlived most of his contemporaries and published books until 80, or who became general and fought in several wars are the ones we think about, skewing our perception of how long people lived back then in the opposite direction.
I often mentioned that if you take all french kings who died of natural death between 1000 and 1500 (and even exclude the one who died in infancy), they lived on average to their late 40s, and only one lived to be 60. English kings during the same period did a bit better, dying on average in their early 50s.
However, this effect is often exagerated. Even though low life expectancy in the past is explained in a large part by childhood mortality, people who reached adulthood also didn’t live nearly as long as we do. The median age of death in France around the renaissace was…10. Half of people born died during infancy/childhood. However, life expectancy for people who reached 21 was still low, they would on average die in their mid 50 (and that’s for the nobility), with almost non-existent progresses over centuries. Both phenomenons resulted in those overall life expectancy figures of 25 or 30.
Life expectancy reached 60 for the French nobility only in the early 1800, and for the general population in the late 19th century (again, that’s for people reaching adulthood to begin with. Life expectancy in France including childhood/infancy deaths was still only 45 in 1900, with a 15% chance of dying in the first year of life).
People of former areas seem to have lived longer than they really did because those we have in mind are those who lived long enough to become famous in the first place. The would be philosopher who kicked the bucket at 30 while penning his second essay, or the bright officer who died of smallpox in his late 20s are forgotten. The guy who outlived most of his contemporaries and published books until 80, or who became general and fought in several wars are the ones we think about, skewing our perception of how long people lived back then in the opposite direction.
I often mentioned that if you take all french kings who died of natural death between 1000 and 1500 (and even exclude the one who died in infancy), they lived on average to their late 40s, and only one lived to be 60. English kings during the same period did a bit better, dying on average in their early 50s.
Not traditionally, no. Most plains Indians lived in towns and cities of thousand of people along the river valleys. Some hunter gatherers did live in the open plains, but even they seem to have worked as seasonal labourers and traded with the farmers, meat for grains.
It was only after the depopulation caused by European diseases that most plains Indians became something like HGs. And of course the horse nomads were all descended from agriculturalists within the last few egnerations, they wer enot traditional HGs.
Not even remotely true. We may have the same life span, but our life expectancy is at least quadruple what it was “thousands of years ago”.
OP: Those are interesting images which are obviously graphics accompanying some academic study. Do you have links to the study’s themselves? What do they say about their methodology, confidence, etc?
On Wikipedia under life expectancy it is mentioned that life expectancy at birth during the neolithic period was 20. This is based on a paper called ‘the neolithic revolution and contemporary variations in life expectancy’.
Life expectancy at birth, as a global average, was 31 in 1900. So a life expectancy of 15-30 at birth in pre agricultural societies is not controversial.
However if you took one of those people and raised them in today’s society they would live to 80.
In the Mesolithic cemeteries up in Northeastern Europe, 50 - 60-year olds are quite common, comprising up to the majority of the interred in some cemeteries. We are dealing with European hunter-gatherers c. 10 - 7 000 years ago here. The oldest person from that period and area that an age estimate has been made is a woman app. 80 years old at time of death. Many people died barely middle-aged, lots died already as children, but reaching past 50 was not rare.
Plains - as in the less fertile grasslands, where settlements risked being overrun by buffalo herds that stretched for days on end - no agriculture. (Sioux (Lakota, Dakota) Crow etc.) Following the herds was the livelihood. You are likely thinking of the “mound builders” and such of the southern and eastern areas of the Mississippi valley, where before the debilitating epidemics cities of 100,000 or more and highly organized social structures were common (Shawnee, Illinois?). The herds did not typically go over that far east as the terrain - big rivers, trees, hills, etc. - was not their habitat. These native groups had agriculture and after the fall continued to have it in roughly the same fashion as the longhouse natives of the eastern forests. Go down to the southern USA and you find the Pueblos of today, the Navajo, and even the lost Anasazi and similar groups - relatively permanent dwellings indicate agriculture as the mainstay, just as the longhouses of the Iroquois and tribes of those areas were centered around fields, with hunting being a supplemental activity.
While trade is a common part of any human habits, I seriously doubt that nomads were in the habit of obtaining a significant part of their food supply from trade, assuming they had anything to trade with. In the days before horses, any meat they could obtain and carry to a large settlement, before it spoiled, the same trip was easily done by the city dwellers themselves, who would also have easier access to wood stockpiles and facilities for smoking (preserving) meat back in the city.
So when the OP asks about hunter-gatherers, well, very few native tribes had that lifestyle. Typically it was the problem that environment or climate did not allow farming. The western plains cycle between dustbowl and fertile, and so are not conducive to crops and permanent habitats unless you are part of a modern western society that can get you through years of poor harvests. Similarly, up north in the Canadian shield area, there is neither the climate nor the soils for good farming.
So to answer the OP - the odds of something killing a person early in life, or even from ages 10 to 40, was a lot higher than today. But those who avoided war, starvation, or disease did live well into their 60’s - and depending on the environment, there were a decent number of these. Typical diseases of our old age - heart conditions, diabetes, high blood pressure and strokes, cancer, flu - were a lot less common to that lifestyle.