The low average life expectancy was not because adults died young but because child mortality (especially for children under 5) was sky-high.
There was also an article on here just yesterday about how we list ancient skeletons as "50+" instead of "75" years old because we can't distinguish ages of skeletons above 50, which also contributes to that misconception.
Long story short: a prehistoric human who made it to puberty had a pretty good chance of living to be 60-80, well past menopause.
Pre-historic humans who made it to puberty didn't live anywhere near 60-80 years on average we have the plenty of skeletons to know that (in fact modern hunter gatherers who do benefit from some levels of outside intervention don't even get to that).
It's also important to note that unlike today or even later in history the age past puberty didn't sky rocket.
Women often died due to child birth, men died hunting dangerous game, and both often died to the elements as at the time we were still migratory and didn't live in settlements.
>Based on Early Neolithic data, total life expectancy at 15 would be 28–33 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
If you have better data by all means share it.
Are you sure? Life expectency of ~30 doesn't mean people didn't live past that, since that's due mostly to child mortality.
>Based on Early Neolithic data, total life expectancy at 15 would be 28–33 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy we have a lot of skeletons.
The fallacy many people tend to fall into is forgetting that while you are quite likely to die at childbirth or early years unless you were extremely privileged you would also be almost as likely to die even when older when every day of your life was a struggle.
Sure the elites that lived lives of relative luxury could live almost as long if they didn't require medical intervention but the plebs? pffttt any accident could be fatal without modern medicine and working hard laboring life without any support structure simply didn't allow people to live that long which caused essentially a pretty big discrepancy in early history and classical times between the life expectancy of the lower and upper classes much more than what we see today.
https://www.brown.edu/academics/economics/sites/brown.edu.ac..., page 32 (the numbers are expectency so for example at 15 if the life expectancyis 14 you get total life expectancy of 29).
In particular the dating of age for ancient skeletons usually comes down to some correlation to tooth and bone growth. You look at their teeth/bone development and approximate the age based on how long it takes modern samples, that we know the age of, to reach a comparable level of development. But at a certain age these all sort to converge to becoming identical meaning we can't really tell the difference between e.g. 50 years old and 80 years old.
And, as mentioned, there's also the issue of representation. Are the measurable samples we have recovered a representative sample or is their some bias or other issue that might be getting in the way? And there's even the problem of assuming identical growth patterns. Did different diets, lifestyles, and even evolutionary changes affect development? Maybe, but we're optimistically hoping the answer is no. All in all the science behind these numbers is just really not all that great, even if it's the best we can do for now.
And in general that's the problem. We have to make a whole lot of optimistic assumptions, but if even one is off then everything is completely thrown off. This is the reason I tend to take pre-historic anthropology with a grain of salt. For that matter even post-historic anthropology tends to often be full of questionable science. For instance one big piece of news was the discovery that a piece of Viking burial cloth, in Sweden, contained Arabic script and references to Allah. The problem is that it was later discovered that the script it was allegedly written in had not yet been invented at the time of the corpse's burial. That such a 'discovery' was not the first thing that was checked before racing to publish seems to be an unfortunately common occurrence in these sort of sciences. It goes without saying that you should try to disprove your hypothesis, not prove it. Only then when you've completely failed to refute your hypothesis should you begin to considering the possibility of its correctness, given available information.
14,000 years ago most people didn’t live pass 30-40, pregnancy takes you out of commission as far as hunting goes for at least a year for population growth it means that a woman had to successfully give birth to more than 2 children that would manage to survive till purberty on average, there are no indications that puberty was any different than it is today which would mean that essentially they only had 10-15 or so years to pop out 3-4 kids if not more considering the child mortality rates of the era.