Men might have borne numerous injuries from manual labour or military service. Many showed the effects of trauma from hard labour, as well as diseases we would associate with later ages, like arthritis. The average age of death was 30, and that wasn’t a mere statistical quirk: a high number of the skeletons were around that age. In 2016, Gazzaniga published her research on more than 2,000 ancient Roman skeletons, all working-class people who were buried in common graves. “The conditions of life, access to medical therapies, even just hygiene – these were all certainly better among the elites.” “There was an enormous difference between the lifestyle of a poor versus an elite Roman,” says Valentina Gazzaniga, a medical historian at Rome’s La Sapienza University. “It implies there must have been non-famous people, who were much more numerous, who lived even longer,” he says. Still, says Scheidel, that’s not to be dismissed. All we can really take away from this is that privileged, accomplished men have, on average, lived to about the same age throughout history – as long as they weren’t killed first, that is. Another is that all of the men were illustrious enough to be remembered. Of course, there were some obvious problems with this sample. The median of those who died between 18? Seventy-one years old – just one year less than their pre-100BC cohort. (The authors speculate that the prevalence of dangerous lead plumbing may have led to this apparent shortening of life). Those born after 100BC lived to a median age of 66. Of the remaining 298, those born before 100BC lived to a median age of 72 years. Of 397 ancients in total, 99 died violently by murder, suicide or in battle. Their ages of death were compared to men listed in the more recent Chambers Biographical Dictionary. But just how common was it?īack in 1994 a study looked at every man entered into the Oxford Classical Dictionary who lived in ancient Greece or Rome. In the ancient world, at least, it seems people certainly were able to live just as long as we do today. (Pliny himself reached barely half that he’s thought to have died from volcanic gases during the eruption of Mt Vesuvius, aged 56). “The senses become dull, the limbs torpid, the sight, the hearing, the legs, the teeth, and the organs of digestion, all of them die before us…” He can think of only one person, a musician who lived to 105, who had a pleasantly healthy old age. “Nature has, in reality, bestowed no greater blessing on man than the shortness of life,” Pliny remarks. Not, however, that ageing was any easier then than it is now. “She was 80 years old, but able to weave a delicate weft with the shrill shuttle”, the epigram reads admiringly. Then there are tombstone inscriptions and grave epigrams, such as this one for a woman who died in Alexandria in the 3rd Century BC. Among them he lists the consul M Valerius Corvinos (100 years), Cicero’s wife Terentia (103), a woman named Clodia (115 – and who had 15 children along the way), and the actress Lucceia who performed on stage at 100 years old. In the 1st Century, Pliny devoted an entire chapter of The Natural History to people who lived longest. To be consul, you had to be 43 – eight years older than the US’s minimum age limit of 35 to hold a presidency. Meanwhile, ancient Rome’s ‘cursus honorum’ – the sequence of political offices that an ambitious young man would undertake – didn’t even allow a young man to stand for his first office, that of quaestor, until the age of 30 (under Emperor Augustus, this was later lowered to 25 Augustus himself died at 75). In the early 7th Century BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that a man should marry “when you are not much less than 30, and not much more”. If one’s thirties were a decrepit old age, ancient writers and politicians don’t seem to have got the message. This belief that our species may have reached the peak of longevity is also reinforced by some myths about our ancestors: it’s common belief that ancient Greeks or Romans would have been flabbergasted to see anyone above the age of 50 or 60, for example. Beyond the UK, these gains are slowing worldwide. In September 2018, the Office for National Statistics confirmed that, in the UK at least, life expectancy has stopped increasing. The natural conclusion is that both the miracles of modern medicine and public health initiatives have helped us live longer than ever before – so much so that we may, in fact, be running out of innovations to extend life further. In 2016, a baby girl could expect to reach 83 a boy, 79. In 1841, a baby girl was expected to live to just 42 years of age, a boy to 40. In the UK, where records have been kept longer, this trend is even greater. The average person born in 1960, the earliest year the United Nations began keeping global data, could expect to live to 52.5 years of age. Over the last few decades, life expectancy has increased dramatically around the globe.
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