Its accepted now that humans did not live very long until recently.
Who were the first recorded or accepted humans to have lived to 50, 60, 70 and 80
Methuselah?
No, it isn’t.
False premise. People didn’t live long on average but that is because many people didn’t survive childhood. People who survived childhood had a decent chance of living to 50, 60 and 70 even in prehistoric times.
This is the Straight Dope. Even if you’re using the Bible as your cite, his father Enoch lived past 80 as well as many others.
The fact that average lifespans were short (due to high infant mortality, and various other reasons) in no way implies that all individuals died young.
Egyptian pharaoh lifes are reasonably well attested - this guy Mentuhotep II - Wikipedia reigned for 51 years so he certainly exceeded 50, and probably 60 (it’s unclear how old he was when he became pharaoh). But there would have been many many other people unknown to history who lived a good long time.
Those ages were likely achieved pre recored history.
It’s kinda, sorta a myth that humans didnt live as long in the past. The reality was that early death, such as during childhood, childbirth or hunting was much more common. So, as a %, few lived past 50. But still, there were old people before history was recorded with any sort of reliability.
The records of the Biblical Patriarchs are clearly legendary, perhaps months not years or perhaps based in numerology.
And that’s the issue of who is the first in “recorded” history, how reliable and how much myth and legend is acceptable.
However, Pepi II Neferkare may well have lived to be 100 but at least 70, around 2184 BC.
Ramesses II is a little more certain, living to be around 90 in 1213 BC, a thousand years later, and was a very real person.
Tai Wu a Shang dynasty King of China apparently reigned for 75 years in 1411 BC- his age is uncertain.
So, 4000 years ago, we know people were living to at least 70.
If you are going by the Bible, Adam was the first to break all of those records. The poor guys died in the cradle compared to early Sumerian kings, though.
Yes, the Psalmist would certainly disagree with the premise in the OP:
This guy from half a million years ago was at least 45 when he died: Earliest traces of a disabled, aged human found
I do like reading a thread where DrDeth is speculating about ancient life spans. 
Well, yes, but modern medicine and nutrition has allowed longer lifespans.
Let’s throw out a number or two. Ramesses II is thought to have lived for around 90 years in the 13th century BC. There’s enough artificacts from festivals and such to know that this is in the ballpark.
There’s no reason to believe that he was an extreme outlier. If you lived an easy life with plenty of resources available it was possible, just not common.
One king list has Pepi II reigning 94 years and perhaps therefore living past 100. But the artifacts don’t show anything beyond 62 years. He lived at the beginning of a chaotic period which reduces the quality and amount of data.
I’m not even sure of that - modern medicine/nutrition allow more people to live to the maximum extent allowable by the basic human frame, but it’s not clear that that maximum has changed.
Its not. Its just that high levels of infant and child mortality made overall life expectancy look low.
Based on this survival curve from the middle ages, around 40% of people born would see their 65th birthday after the black death picked off the weak and sickly.
We dont have any records of anyone living past 115 until the late 20th century. I think that before modern medicine, 100 was about it, more or less. Now, we can get 10, maybe 20 years past that.
I don’t have the cite offhand, but from looking at social security actuarial tables I think life expectancy for people in their 60s has only gone up 3-5 years since the 1940s due to medicine.
So its gone up, but not by a whole lot in the last 70-80 years.
It may have increased slightly. Modern medicine no doubt increases the number of old people who get a chance to live very long lives, which would tend to bump the maximum up a bit.
But it is indeed doubtful that there’s any large change in the age of the oldest human over the past few millennia.
There was a thread earlier this year about the supposed upper limit on human lifespans. Recently there have been claims that at 105, the expected additional years that a person will live is one year and will continue to be one year for the rest of their life. So if you have a huge collection of people who live to 105, you can expect that half of them will live to 106, one quarter of them will live to 107, one-eighth of them will live to 108, one sixteenth of them will live to 109, . . . , one in 1024 will live to 115, . . ., one in 1,048,576 will live to 125, . . . , one in 1,073,741,824 will live to 135, . . ., etc.
So if the expected additional years that someone will live indeed is one year for anyone over 105, there hasn’t been enough people who ever lived to expect that anyone to ever live much longer than the usually accepted figure of 122 years for Jeanne Calment, since there have only been about 105 billion people who ever lived. As I pointed out in the thread from earlier this year, there then isn’t really a maximum age that any human can live to.
Suppose it is medically impossible to make the average lifespan greater than is the case in the most long-lived countries of today. Suppose over the entire past and future history of the human race there will be 105 quadrillion people. Then we can expect there will be 35,000,000 people who will ever live to be 120 over the history of the human race in the past and the future. If it continues to be true that at 105 you have a 50% chance of dying every year, it will then be true that we can expect someone to live to 145. If these suppositions are true, then the term “maximum lifespan of a human” doesn’t mean that anyone who lives to some given age will drop dead at that age no matter what their health is. It means that it just becomes increasingly unlikely for each age that anyone could ever live to that age. If you tell me that you flipped a coin ten times and got heads each time I might believe you. If you tell me that you flipped it a million times and got heads each time, I won’t believe you.