The ultimate cause of death is, I suppose, birth…
I’d heard years ago that diarrhea was one of the most common causes of death for much of history, and it probably continues to be in very poor countries with little health care. Death by dehydration. IIRC, this was as much a danger to the troops during the Civil War as enemy fire.
You could further extrapolate and say that lack of clean drinking water, and proper sanitation, caused many or most of those deaths. I don’t really know if this information is true to any degree. Sounds like it could be, and I’ve long believed it. I’m open to being corrected, if necessary.
How about The Black Death / bubonic plague?
IIRC, there have been 107 billion people in total with 7 billion of them living now. In prehistoric times, infant mortality was about 20% to 30% and about half the people died before reaching their tenth birthday.
So it would be childbirth and whatever diseases and malnutrition were causing that.
It would also depend on when you consider a human to be formed, if you believe it to be from the moment of conception on, there are billions of pregnancies that did not reach full-term.
I read that adult men in pre-modern times had about a 50% chance of dying by violence. But childhood diseases probably beat that in numbers, and for adult women it was probably a combination of childbirth and malnutrition. Dysentery and Typhus and other shitting diseases are presumably high up there on the list, too. I’ve read that plumbing (including clean water and sewers) has saved more lives than vaccines in the 20th Century, and I believe it.
Some analysis of that 107B number here.
Certainly not, no. Wherever you draw that particular line, it’s not homicide.
Hell, just in the twentienth century, smallpox killed at least 300 million people, which is about twice as many people as in all the wars in the 20th century combined.
I never seen a turtle.
But I understand what you mean.
Good eating on a tortoise.
Wrong. Heart disease by a long shot.
More significant to answering the question is the realization that what killed people in prehistoric times is a small fraction of all human deaths - almost 7% of all humans who have ever been alive on this planet are living now?
In point of fact the population of humans was quite small (SciAm source)for most of history very gradually reaching about 300 million by A.D. 1. and 500 million by about 1650. 150 more years to doubling to a billion (by 1850) and another 152 years had it up to 6.2 billion. Current world population 7.2 billion.
engineer_comp_geek’s cite is nice but it is United States only.
Worldwide currently it’s
Coronary heart disease 8.756 million
Strokes 6.241 million
Lower respiratory infections 3.190 million
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease 3.170 million
I’s still bet on infectious diseases though. For most of pre 1900 world history I’d bet specifically on diarrheal diseases killing mainly in childhood. Bu finding a cite to document that is harder than I thought it would be!
Here’s my attempt at grouping causes of death:
- Contagious diseases (direct contagion from other people, like flu, measles)
- Contagious diseases (indirect contagion, like sewage-spread diseases, flea-borne illnesses)
- Other infections (tetanus, sepsis, gum disease)
- Cancer
- Wearing out (I’d include heart disease, kidney disease, and Alzheimer’s in that category)
- Complications of childbearing/giving birth
- Complications of being born, and congenital problems that kill early
- Killed by others in war
- Killed by other people intentionally, but individually rather than war
- Misadventure (including accidental deaths caused by people, deaths caused by animals, unintentional drowning)
- Suicide
There’s some overlap. Women who died in childbirth probably often got infected. For that matter, same with people killed by animals. And maybe some things that might be interesting to track cross categories, like drug overdose, which could be misadventure, suicide, or murder. And I probably missed something. But it’s a start, and I’d like to see it improved and enumerated.
You’re right that the bulk of population growth is quite recent, say the last 1000-1500 years at most. But …
Ref Darren’s link, human history goes back 100,000ish years (i.e. ~80x as long). The vast length of that long-but-low tail contains far *more *volume than does the short-time-but-very-tall spike we’re at the upper right tip of.
So the deaths of prehistory are the ones that matter for the total. Modern stats (even for 1700ish AD values of “modern”) are rounding errors by comparison.
My take: childhood mortality mostly from infectious disease, malformity, and infanticide / starvation.
I think I agree with your bottom line with some quibble on the getting there.
Okay, let’s take that long tail. At least according to wiki from 100K years ago to about 12K years ago world population was under 4 million and most of that time under 1 million, likely much below, certainly less than 1/80th the average of the last 100 to 1500 years.
Mind you that’s living population not lives lived and died. If lives were much shorter on average then many more people may have lived and died than total population might superficially suggest. Indeed that same wiki article states:
So I think we have three main periods to consider and to divvy the 107 billion into: prehistory with its long tail maybe 4 billion and one end; the world since clean water, sanitation, and antibiotics, call it the last century, and using wiki’s citation of Haub that seems to be something like 13 billion having lived; and the section of agriculture and civilization onset to then, which seems to be the bulk of all those who have ever lived.
But it does seem that the big death number was infant mortality in all but the last century. Even in 1900 the infant mortality rate was up to 30% in many American cities and 20 to 30% seems to be a pretty accepted number worldwide for infant mortality before 1900.
Not sure if “infant mortality” counts though as a “cause” in and of itself. How many of them died of malnutrition and how many from infectious diseases and how many from a combination of both? Even with accurate records it would be hard to tease out which should count as the cause of death.
Even if it’s impossible to clearly divide the two, or even to make a wild guess, they are responsible for far more deaths than the top killers of modern, developed countries. Remember that almost half of the world lives in poverty now and even with more access to modern medicine, infectious diseases and malnutrition cause many deaths in poorer countries.
In his last book, Jared Diamond claimed that violence in tribal societies was much greater (though I don’t have the book here for cites).
I have read in several different sources that until recently (mid-1800s), the Major causes of death for men was war, for women childbirth (because of lack of Hygiene); once you disregarded deaths from birth till 5 years old - a lot of children (like in 3rd world countries today) die from Cholera /diarrhea and similar easy preventable diseases.
Infant mortality is definitely up there, but that can take many different forms. You’ve got complications from childbirth (including cases where the midwife or whoever was forced to choose between the baby and the mother), you’ve got deliberate infanticide (which I’ve heard was common in hunter-gatherer societies as the only practical means of population control), you’ve got accidents like the new mother rolling over on top of the baby in her sleep, you’ve got infectious diseases like measles, mumps, and rubella, you’ve got wild animal attacks, and you’ve got some things that we’re even today not completely sure what causes them (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).
It seems we do know, but experts don’t want to tell the parents because they might not want to hear it 5 Medical Myths And Prejudices That Kill People Every Day | Cracked.com (Number 4)