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by echelon 1848 days ago
Infant mortality is what brought the average lifespan down.

People also had harsher lives and were exposed to a wide variety of stressors, diseases, malnutrition, etc.

1 comments

Life expectancy at birth, not lifespan.
Life expectancy at birth is a worthless statistic to compare to when looking at modern humans. Infant mortality was so high that it distorts the numbers. A more useful statistic is the modal age of adult death, which peaks between 65 and 75 across most estimates, regardless of era: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1728-4457....

https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/when-did-humans-star...