On 9/12/2012 8:30 AM, Doug Franklin wrote:
On 2012-09-12 1:11, Joseph McAllister wrote:
Why did it take so long to attain that, as an average?
According to a class I took years ago, the answer is infant mortality.
IIRC, the professor claimed that if, in 1776, you ignored the deaths
of those less than either six or ten years old in the calculation, the
average lifespan was over 60, rather than the under 50 or so that you
get when you include the infant/child deaths.
The average age of death of a medieval blacksmith was 74, the only thing
special about that is that he had survived childhood. It was only high
childhood mortality that reduced average lifespan to 30 years. Most
places didn't even record the births of children to anyone not of any
special social stature until they had been christened. So even those
statistics overstate average lifespan.
--
Don't lose heart, they might want to cut it out, and they'll want to avoid a
lengthly search.
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