Were Cave-men actually only Cave-Teenagers???

Great Debates
1

Ok I was recently looking at some world demographic information this weekend, I was looking at mortality rates for the 19th century in the United States and Europe. Specifically I was looking at the Whaling days of Coastal New England and the average ages of sea captains and mates… (I live close to an old whaling port…)

Well some of the facts I was finding were quite startling…For instance: The Population Reference Bureau states:

So how logical would it be to ay that Australopithecus africanus was most likely 8-10 years old at maximum and then a few millennia later cave men or cave teens could have easily only reached 15-17 years old…

Wow ! Could this be fact? Were our cave grand mothers and grand fathers only teenagers? I wonder if plato was considered ancient even when he was alive… ? This puts a whole new meanig to ageism and respecting your elders…

I surmise that initially elders were respected simply because they made it soo far in life, which may have only meant to the ripe old age of 35 back in the Roman era.

If we are in a constant state of living longer each generation what would the teeming millions think our highest age will be that we can expect to hit sometime in the next millennia?

2

Remember life expectancy is an average, way back when it wasn’t all that uncommon for a family to lose a child to disease. No cite but I vagely recall 10-15% from somewhare. Kids dying in large quantities plays hell with life expectancy calculations.

3

Linear extrapolation can get you into trouble. Extend the same logic and you have our earlier ancestors dying off at the ripe old age of 4 or 5. Must’ve been difficult for them to raise their kids.

One of the sneaky keys to this stat is the word “average”. The average ages were very low in part because of the high infant mortality rates. Cultures of 5000 years ago had some senior citizens, if not as high a proportion as we do; they had their 60 and 50 and 40 year olds, and their 25 year olds were not considered to be old men soon to die.

4

my guess is that you’re reading too much into the life expectancy bit. it’s an average, not the maximum age of the majority of the population.

there may well have been some 40-50 year old cavemen, but then again there would have been a lot more babies who didn’t make the first 3 months.

i’m not coming from an informed position though.

and considering my typical teenage ‘i’m indestructable’ attitude, i am firmly convinced that my generation will be the first to achieve immortality.

see y’all in the year 3000!

5

There have always been people that lived to a truly ripe old age during all periods in history. An average life expectancy of 35 during a given period does not mean that most people died around that time. What it means is that a very high infant and childhood mortality rate pulled the average way down for the whole population.

If an individual made it through childhood in good health, then there was an excellent chance that he or she would live a long life. The most critical periods in population mortality are infancy, childhood, and then late middle age, and old age (what we term it today). Some people would have made it all the way through childhood without significant disease or injury during all of these periods. This means that there would have always been the odd person living into his 60’s, 70’s or even beyond.

6

I recall hearing somewhere that life expectancy actually decreased when our ancestors went from a hunter-gather lifestlye to an intensive agriculture based lifestyle. The life expectancy during the Roman ages may actually have been lower than that during our ancient caveman days.

7

Modt likely due not to food supply but rather disease from living closer together and water contamination. You’d be amazed how log it tokk for people to discover things like that. Militias i the Civil War commonly dumped latrines upstream from the drinking water (no wonder the dysentary rate was sky-high).

8

In general, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was our “garden of eden”. It wasn’t truly perfect, but it sure beat hell out of the circumstances of daily living under agriculture. (And in some ways it still beats hell out of modern technological postagrarian society). But when you have too many people packed into an area to get by on just grabbing what’s already out there, h/g ceases to be practical, and the settled communities, once they existed, tended to push the h/g groups into the less wanted land.

I doubt that the !Kung San people of the Kalahari have a longer lifespan than we do, and they may not be doing better disease-wise (they may be exposed to less, but presumarly they are less able to do anything about it when they are), but IIRC they have an average work-week not exceeding 8 hours. That’s not per day, btw.

9

They probably had some elders in the 40 to 60 year range, if they were lucky. Current aboriginal tribes have members that old who were born before civilization came along and mucked them and their environment up.

Now, mortality rates would be high for people then in their teens and twenties, especially for males, because that is when guys get most combative and reckless. They would be killed off in hunting or fights with each other or nearby enemy tribes. The harsher the environment, the less likely they would live to a ripe old age.

During the 14th century, you have people living to a ripe old age, but during the 17th and 18th centuries in the USA, you have farmers and pioneers dying off in their 20s and 30s because of the harsh life they lived.

Social structure, environment and living conditions contribute heavily to life spans. Like within the last 100 years, the average life span has gone from late 60s to up into the late 80s and 90s, with more people living until nearly 100 or reaching over a hundred than before.

In history, most of the people who lived long lived were in the aristocracy, and therefore had better diet, shelter, medical care and less hard work than the average person of the time did. They might not have had air conditioning (which, by the way, in hot climates, has been a great saver of heart patients), but they lived in better homes, ate better foods, were cleaner on the average and did less bone cracking work than the guy living in a reed and mud hovel with a dirt floor who worked outside from sun up to sun down.

So, there are many variables to consider on the whole, but it is very likely that prehistoric man lived only mostly up to his teens and early 20s. They would have bred young, meaning as soon as the females got their periods, and bred frequently, but the always difficult teen years probably got them killed off faster than now. Even today, for men, the most trouble they get into is from puberty to about age 27.

10

also remeber that the way we define adulthood may not have meant the same thing way back when. many ppl here have siad that is an avg. but i dont think this has anything to do with the question. i think, although u probably are right, cavemen in the technical sence were mostly in their teen yr while they were cavemen. on a social standrad, they grew mature and ready to take care of themselves much earlier than modernday man. in reality, by living so long today, we actually defy nature, and with that we have augmented the lengths of the segments in our biological clock.

11

Yes.

12

Doghouse the link returns access forbidden.

13

the link works for me

14

And now it does for me as well :D.