This might be the wrong place to post this so feel free to move.
I was wondering this; if life expectancy was 30-40 years old in Medieval times would a 40-year-old person back then look like an 80-year-old person today? Or were the long-bearded old men we see pictured actually living past the life expectancy?
Average life expectancy in the Middle Ages was much lower than today mainly due to infant mortality and death during child birth.
So there would have been a good number of people in their 50-70’s, certainly a bit more worse for wear than modern Western society, but not dramatically so. Hard labor would certainly take its toll on the body, and lack of sanitation and medicine would take a large percentage as well. But human life *range *(not expectancy) hasn’t changed dramatically over the centuries. There have always been some folks living into their 70s and 80s.
Note this table is for the nobles. Field workers, then as now, die much younger on average.
They looked older, but it was not a one-to-one correspondence. Medical care was much worse, they spent more time in the sun, their nutrition was much worse, women didn’t have makeup, etc., so they aged faster, but the old men you mention were probably in their sixties or seventies.
They also lost their teeth, which makes your face look fallen in and old.
Regards,
Shodan
As noted, the main reason life expectancy was lower in the past was because children tended to die young. If you made it past childhood and where killed in raids, war, plague or whatever you could live into your 60’s or even older. I’d say that, yes, people tended to look older for a given age back then than they do today. You can see that even today…the older generation (my parents or grandparents) just looked older during middle or advanced age than people generally do today, and people in less advanced countries are the same. If you go to Europe or Japan people in the 50’s or 60’s often look like the older generations did when they were in the 40’s, and sometimes even in their 30’s. It strikes me most often when I go visit family in Mexico, since a lot of my family still there are in very rural parts of the country and still do a lot of farming, that there is a huge difference between my family here in the US and those still back in the old country.
Heck, just look at pictures of adults from ‘earlier times.’ Back in the day, people started looking old quick!
I have a few photos of me, as a baby, sitting on my grandmother’s lap. She was born in “the old country” and had a hard life. In this photo, her entire face was filled with deep wrinkles. I figured out her age at the time must have been 65. My mom, on the other hand, lived to be 92, and didn’t have half the wrinkles grandma had at 65.
As others have mentioned, life expectancy at birth is heavily influenced by death from disease and accidents.
I’ve heard some claims that life expectancy at birth in the stone age could have been as low as 18. It wasn’t that people dropped dead at 18, it is more that 2/3 of people died in childhood, and the rest died around age 40-50. Average it out and lifespan was 18.
As far as age and life expectancy, it is more how hard you live. Malnutrition, sun exposure, lack of medical care, lack of rest, etc. all make you look older. I’ve heard stories of North Korea during the famine, people who were in their 20s would escape to china or South Korea, and people would assume they were in their 40s or 50s. The hard life of starvation and hard labor had made them look much much older.
I read a book about scurvy once that claimed that life onboard a ship in the middle ages aged people. Even by midevil standards, sailors looked 10-15 years older than everyone else. So back then I’m sure a 25 year old could pass for someone in their 50s.
Look in the third world today, at people who worked manual labor all their lives. People in their 50s often look like they are in their 70s. Their bodies are broken from a lifetime of “hard work”, which the rich tell us never hurt anyone.
Expectations have a lot to do with how people look. Edith Bunker, when All In the Family premiered, was supposed to be 48. That’s two years younger than I am now. But I wear jeans and T-shirts, not housedresses, and I don’t get my hair “done” once a week in a style that has to be maintained with shower caps, sleeping curlers, dryers, and teasing combs.
One thing I have to be grateful to the Boomers for was putting an end to that nonsense.
My grandmother (maternal) was 50 when I was born, and looks very Edith Bunkery in the pictures of her I have of us when I was really little, I remember being three or so, and thinking that while I loved her dearly, she was impossibly old.
Now I’m that age, My interactions with children are completely different.
People who are closer to my age can’t guess it, because they, too, have the “Edith Bunker” image in their heads. Younger women who don’t, and compare me to their mothers, who look more like me, then to guess my age more correctly.
Here’s an extreme case: From 1965, My 49-year-old uncle.
We don’t have to guess what (upper-class) people in the past looked like at various ages; there are plenty of portraits that can be dated reasonably precisely, and while some of them are of course deliberately flattering to the sitter, some are very realistic indeed. Here’s Rembrandt at 54. And here is the famous “warts and all” portrait of Oliver Cromwell, also in his mid-fifties.
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