"hey kids, stop playing outside and come eat this rotten meat we cooked! After dinner we'll have some cigarettes"

* we didn't cook

Hate to say it since it seems so cliché, but survivorship bias.

Yeah, well, if he had really good genes (with few genetic defects), maybe he would have lived another 15 years or so if he had a clean diet and good living conditions.

Show me a guy that lived in the same conditions and lived 5 years or more past the current world record (116 years) and then I'll take more notice.

Meanwhile, I'll drink my clean water or enjoy my clean and clear skin for what time I do have left.

(In Ladies Man voice): Mm. Yeah. Well that is disthgustin'.

He probably didn't ingest sugar and fats, also had a life without anxiety.

And a lot of luck. These are all statistical correlations, there are bound to be outliers.

Those correlations might imply causations as well. Just because we can't (yet) tell for sure, we cannot reliably attribute the phenomenon to luck either.

Fasted by default, heat and cold exposure every day, carnivore diet if he only ate rotten meat.

But porcupine was best. I mean, say what you will, he still had a discerning palate.

hmm Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have famously horrible diets yet sill fully active at 91. I think a lot of it comes down to genes. Some people simply do not suffer from the ravages of age compared to others even when they seemingly break the rules.

Survivorship bias my friend. Literally.

One of the most interesting things in all of history to me is the longevity in Ancient Greece. Look up nearly any Ancient Greek one is aware of and you'll find life lengths not especially different than modern times. A study of 'Ancient Greeks of Note' [1] found an average life expectance of a bit more than 71 years.

The obvious explanation for this is a survivorship bias, but the vast majority of these Greeks made their way into the history books many decades before their deaths. I don't find the class issue relevant (beyond of course agreeing that poor Greeks would have had shorter lifespans) since all the money in the world couldn't buy one a single dose of penicillin.

[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18359748/

You should take into account that (besides survivorship bias), "Ancient Greeks" you know of are all part of the aristocracy: that means good food, no hard labor, and access to whatever health care was available at the time.

Isn't the idea that he average life expectancy in antiquity is 40 ish years more to do with the high infant mortality rate than anything else?

Doesn't this mean that modern medicine is pretty horrible though, apart from infant care? With all our know-how, theories, experience, tools, drugs, scanners, etc - we still basically aren't much better than ancient Greece?

Alternatively, it could mean our way of life is terrible and our medical knowledge is the only thing keeping us ahead.

Maybe, but if I didn't know we have similar life spans I would've guessed that modern life is far safer and healthier than ancient life. Some examples - better nutrition as evidenced by height and diet diversity, not drinking dirty water or eating dirty food, temperature controls, modern policing, not regularly exposed to dangerous animals or conditions, etc.

That's mostly hygiene. Bad hygiene is why cities are often associated with disease-- cities are often full of unhygienic practices that allow bacteria and virii to fester. They still didn't understand seizures, or cancer-- ie they were good at one dimension among many that exist in illnesses.

In Ancient Greece one of my favorite little tales is a toilet one. Toilet paper, of course, did not exist. And so the Greeks used sponges, often on a short stick. And these sponges would be cleaned by swirling them about in as bit of water, or for the fancy toilets - a bit of vinegar. They had communal butt brushes in other words.

And there are many other issues of similar effect. Many of the hygienic practices that we now generally believe are intuitive, were anything but. For instance the idea that doctors should wash their hands before examining patients or even doing surgery was simply unknown all the way up until the 19th century [1]. Incidentally, while a basic germ theory was proposed in the 16th century, it wasn't until the 19th that it would come to be accepted as valid.

[1] - https://www.history.com/news/hand-washing-disease-infection

For what it's worth, we can assume he practiced sexual abstinence for about as long as he didn't bathe.

If anything this shows how bad our food has become in the west. It's literally better to eat unprocessed rotten meat, drink unsanitary water and smoke then to eat the modern western diet.