Agree completely with your refinements. That’s probably as close as we’re gonna get conceptually.
And absent discovering any thorough records like, say, a section in the Domesday Book on mortality, we’re probably not going to get stronger numerical data.
A tiny point I made up-thread that nobody else seems to have picked up on was infanticide. We’ve had a couple threads, and may even have one going currently, on how often that was/is practiced in primitive conditions (regardless of era up to and including today) when food was/is scarce. There’s no point in feeding a baby for 6 months that you “know” won’t make it. Better to spend those very scarce calories on Mom & the other kid(s).
I wonder how much of a role that has played in the total infant mortality figures over time? Certainly not answerable about the past and probably not much answerable about the present.
While infanticide was always a strategy for controlling population numbers, most traditional societies suppressed birth rate through various proactive means - contraception, prolonged breastfeeding etc - rather than cranking out kids just to kill them. Infanticide tended to come in, anthrop evidence shows, when there was a famine or other stress event, not when it was business as usual.
In the overall picture the newborn component of a population may be something like 5-10% of a population at maximum. Whatever infanticide is taking place to create that proportion, it is balanced by all of the causes of death that are taking out the other 90-95% of the population.
The Mongol conquests in the 13th century killed many millions, if you include deaths indirectly caused war as well as clear homicides. For example, Wikipedia: “the total population of Persia may have dropped from 2,500,000 to 250,000 as a result of mass extermination and famine [during the Mongol conquest].”
The Mongol conquest left a signal in the Y-chromosome record: about 5% of the males in Mongol domains carry the Khan’s Y-chromosome.
And over 50% of the males in Western Europe today carry the Y-chromosome of the King of Bell Beaker who lived about 2500 BC.That genetic clade expanded so rapidly in the following centuries as to boggle the mind. Even without specific archaeological evidence, we must conclude there was widespread genocidal killing of males during the Bell Beaker expansion.
And other expansions may similarly have involved slaughter.
That 4% likely is a reasonable estimate for most of premodern times. Clearly not the leading cause of death but pretty dang high one for women.
And of course a mother dying likely had significant impact on the odds of not just the baby’s survival, but of the survival of other younger children in the family.
Chronos I do not disagree that there were many forms of infant mortality. I also appreciate that it would be hard to parse out proximate from ultimate causes of death. Meaning for example a child who is malnourished dies when they get a case of diarrhea that a less malnourished child or a young adult with more stores would have survived … the infectious diarrhea is the proximate cause of death and the chronic malnutrition more of the ultimate cause.
In that period from onset of agriculture-based societies to about a century ago that represent most of all who have ever lived malnutrition during childhood was pretty common. Agriculture often resulted on enough calories but not necessarily enough nutrition (limited food diversity) and access to the calories and the diversity of food sources was often unequal within societies. Children, and this is no less true in much of the world today, are most at risk of inadequate nutrition’s impacts.
Earlier on in this thread violent death was suggested as a major cause of death over history. While it is an exaggeration to call it the leading cause, it is of interest to see how much it actually was in the different time frames.
These figures document a good … stab … at the historical record. The median violent death rate in prehistoric archeologic site is about 13% and the media given for pre-state societies is 20%. And one suspects that these violent deaths were disproportionately male. It drops to under 5% in state societies.
So violent death was indeed a contender for the number one spot in prehistory but even with the long tail more people have lived in state societies by far, and in that era violent death became a much smaller player.
It seems likely best to view a historic transition in causes of death.
The period before the agricultural revolution and before state societies in which violent death was a major contender and in particular males seem to have had a one in three chance of violence being the cause of death, in which infant mortality was very high, in which childbirth mortality was a significant contributor to women’s deaths.
From the onset of agriculture and the state society to about a century ago in which male violent death became a less major contender globally overall, infant mortality stayed high, and crowding and close contact with domestic animal vectors with poor sanitation increase various infectious disease rates, interspersed with famines and pandemics causing spikes in death rates. (I suspect that hold true even if counts the indirect deaths related to war and political oppression, such as during the Mongol conquests, and the Famines caused by Stalin.)
And the period of the last century or so in which infant mortality and infectious disease deaths have decreased dramatically as a result of improvements in living conditions (sanitation, etc.), immunizations, and antibiotics, leading into deaths from what can be lumped together as “degenerative diseases” getting a chance to become number one (heart disease, strokes, cancers, etc.)
State societies don’t have continuous violent death through skirmishes; but they have wars too often, which kill of whole Generations in one swoop. The 30 years war in Northern Germany (along with famine and hard winters) killed 70% - 90% of the Population. So a village of 900 People went down to 9 survivors. People in the countryside prayed to God for thanks after a ton of snow fell - which usually spelled death - because it made a wall of almost 2 m (Yards) high, which hid the farm from the soldiers. It was better to freeze or starve than be raped or plundered or tortured by soldiers.
Altogether, Germanys Population was reduced down to one third, which had big effects on Society - a lot of professions were suddenly open, and People had to pay more to get servants and similar.
Even if we accept your figures it is still also true that overall globally, violence as a cause of death decreased dramatically since the advent of state based societies.
The impact of the Thirty Years War on Germany’s population being decreased to a third? Maybe if one counts the decreased birth rate, people leaving as refugees, and the Plagues that occurred around the same time. Killed by the violence itself in this localized pocket of horrific violence? No need to resort to hyperbole. Maybe “20 percent of Germany’s total population perished during the war.” Some estimates even go as high as 40% of Germany’s population. (90% of the population? Cite please.)
Horrific. It was enough to be a major contributor a short spike in the total global military plus civilian death rate from conflict from the baseline of 5/100,000 to nearly 150/100,000 which lasted about a decade, then coming back down. Since then major conflicts have indeed seen that global total spike back up and then back down, maybe half the time at peaks of 20/100K plus and half the time at less than 5, with the only other spike hitting 100/100K plus being WW2.
No question wars too often.
But eyeballing it it looks like the average was maybe 15/100K global death rate due to global conflicts over time. Not an insignificant contributor to total global deaths and of major transient local impacts but not overall a leading cause of death globally, and not in or even close to the range that it was before state societies.
And correction to a previous post - I missed typing a zero. The long tail is guessed at as 40 billion (assuming the average LE of 10 years), not 4 billion. The big chunk of all who ever lived though remain in period from state society onset to the before about a century ago.
Of the ~108 billion people who have ever lived, supposedly 90%+ of them have lived in the last 12,000 years. Of people who do live in those societies, a lot died from infectious diseases.
So whatever kills people in agricultural societies. Various kinds of infectious diseases, but I’m not sure which one you can pinpoint. There are over 200 pathogenic microbes, so I don’t know which one is the worst.
I said “up to 90% of population in Northern Germany” and then gave the rough figures I remembered for the whole population.
Northern/ Estern Germany was hit hardest because the skirmishes waged back and forth - my own town still has a plaque dedicated by relieved citizens that the Swedes only took some prominent citizens for ransom of a high sum of silver, but otherwise left the city unharmed. But when I got a guided tour through Osnabrück, one of the three peace cities, and heard their numbers, it brought home how horrible it was for them.
Which goes again back to: how do we slice things? Are we looking at regions? How long a timeframe in order to get averages? Both famines / epidemics and wars cause spikes, which distort shorter timeframes.
For that matter, what counts as (unusual) cause of death since everybody is going to die some day? Is a 60year old dying of old age before 1900 discounted or not?
For anything not-war or famine, medical diagnosies have changed a lot over the centuries. Plague could refer to any epidemic or specifically the black plague (although this seperates into three major different diseases, too). Consumption or wasting away could be tubercolosis or cancer, if it was internal (externally visible tumors were known and called cancer in Antiquity already, but internal were difficult to find, and operations risky before hygiene).
There are also the secondary consequences. If every year, 10% of the population die through a common disease for that region (e.g. Malaria), or 20% of children up to 5 year die, society adapts to that* and copes.
But if a whole generation of males - every between 20 and 30 years - is drafted into war and killed (or maimed), society breaks down; fields can’t be harvested. If an army marches through and destroys the fields, they haven’t shot anybody, but most people will still starve. If an army is on the move, an epidemic can both be easily spread, and finds a population weakened through hunger.
Hence, the black plague passing through Europe after 30 years war, or the Spanish influenza after WWI; or the AIDS epidemic in the 80s hitting a whole generation of young, finally well-educated young Africans, leaving behind orphaned families (often shunned by society for fear of infection) and a stop in growing economies. Heck, Ireland today is still showing signs of the potatoe famine in the 18th century.
If a famine happens, not only do adults and young babies die off; the children and teens will likely be malnourished, meaning that as adults they are weaker physically and mentally than well-nourished children, and more suspectible to other illnesses.
Do we count those deaths under the original war / famine, or not because they happen many years later?
After WWII, Europe got hit with some of the coldest winters, while people were suffering from hunger. Many, esp. old people died. The specific cause might be Pneumonia or influenza, or “dying in their sleep”, but the contributing causes were cold and malnourishment. Otherwise, they might have lived 10 years longer. So how do you count that?
No matter how heartbreaking it is for the individuals concerned.
The way I’ve read it is that if a doctor writes “cause of death: cardiac arrest” it really means “I don’t know” or “I couldn’t find anything specific” because today, death is defined as “the heart stops beating” so all death is cardiac arrest in the end, the real question is: what caused the heart to stop beating, and is thus the real cause of death.
“Cardiac arrest” might be code for “I don’t know”, but there are still some deaths where the doctor does know, and where cardiac arrest doesn’t fit. For instance, decapitation.
And death is not defined as “the heart stops beating”. There are people walking around today living normal lives without a beating heart.
Well the op was asking over the timeframe of humanity and in trying to answer the question I proposed three timeframes that functioned very differently from other.
Within each time frame there were spikes of various sorts, localized temporally or geographically or both, but the nature of those spikes and their distributions were such that one could still some make best guesses for those periods as wholes.
Death due to “old age” fits into the broad “degenerative disease” category in my way of thinking. A cause of death that relatively fewer died of until the last century or so. Now they lead.
But yes even today when categorizing “cause of death” the distinction between the proximate cause and the ultimate cause makes for some difficulties.
Easy example - for much of the last century there were many deaths proximately due to lung cancer and heart disease that were ultimately caused by tobacco use. Do you count those deaths as lung cancer and heart disease deaths or tobacco deaths?
Just Fucking Google It?