[yomly]

Tangentially I was blown away to read that the age of the court officials during the Ancient Chinese Three Kingdoms period could allegedly go as high as in the 70s which is pretty crazy for ~200AD

But supposedly disease was well contained in at court by the sparsity of people for the given area because everything was so vast.

[juskrey]

Pretty crazy is how modern scholars don't see a difference between average lifespan at birth and at some age. Humans were always living up to 100, conditional on survival until some age.

Moreover, to become court official, one had to reach some wisdom first, hence the age

[truculent]

“Some age” doing a lot of work here. Yeomen in 14th Century England who made it to 20 years old still had a life expectancy of just 48-52 (depending on when in the century).

Source: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/standards-of-living-in-...

P.187

[jbay808]

Doesn't that mean that for each one that dies at 30, there may well be another that dies at 70?

[truculent]

Life expectancy is mean not median, and the median wouldn’t work like that either.

Of course, some people loved to 70, I think there would be virtually no circumstances where that would be expected (ignoring ad absurdum takes like “age 69 and 364 days”)

[melling]

What was the life expectancy once you reached the age of 30 in 200AD China?