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Re:The Horrors of Pompeii by inglor_cz on Saturday July 08, 2023 @04:12AM (#36642415)
"However those who survived to adulthood had a life expectancy considerably closer to modern ones than most people think."

Nope. I see this consistently repeated all over HN or Reddit, but it just isn't true. Only the high clergy routinely reached their late 60s, and trying to analyze general mortality from the relatively sparse ancient records that mostly concerned the richest and most important people introduces enormous biases.

It is the burial grounds that tell the full story without major biases (there still are biases caused by, say, sailors drowning and their bones not being buried on land - a nontrivial cause of death in a maritime imperium). And the bones of average people indicate that over half didn't live to see their 60th birthday until the 19th century.

In some really bad periods (the Dark Ages in Europe), the average buried adult person is in their early forties - a tale of food insecurity and constant raids. Rome, at least, was mostly food secure and had long periods of peace, so celebrating your 50th birthday was very thinkable for a free Roman citizen of non-pauper status.

Edit: someone downvoting this. People, just take any paper about an archeological excavation of an old burial ground and the detected age distribution of the skeletons found. People over 60 are untypical, though always present in all periods until well into the industrial revolution. And early Medieval cemeteries skew a lot younger than either Rome at its height, or the Late Middle Ages with their better agriculture and more capable governments.

Re:The Horrors of Pompeii by Dah00n on Saturday July 08, 2023 @05:08AM (#36642698)
How is this different to today in countries not living the good life because they have exported slavery to other countries? Africa for example seem worse off than what you wrote. Around 1% at 60:

https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2022/

To compare to a time when slaves were near, surely we must add our poor regions, where people work in mines and factories for us, to our life expectancy. Otherwise we are as much comparing Modern Capitalism to feudalism, etc.

Re:The Horrors of Pompeii by hist_thr on Saturday July 08, 2023 @06:18AM (#36643038)
Now look at population growth. The Roman empires population was largely stagnant between the 1st century AD to the 3rd. Africa's population has increased 10 fold in the same period.
Re:The Horrors of Pompeii by inglor_cz on Saturday July 08, 2023 @06:46AM (#36643173)
What you say is partly true, partly not. Africans definitely die earlier.

But the current shape of the African population pyramid is partly determined by the baby boom in the last three generations. There were many fewer Africans around in 1963 (which is when people who are now aged 60 were born), so even if they all lived long (which they didn't), their share on the 2023 population would be much lower than in societies which barely reproduce themselves.

Re:The Horrors of Pompeii by User23 on Saturday July 08, 2023 @10:49AM (#36644948)
Has there truly been an African baby boom, or is it that the birth rate has remained stable-ish and the survival rate has skyrocketed?
Re:The Horrors of Pompeii by inglor_cz on Saturday July 08, 2023 @02:29PM (#36647310)
I suspect it is a bit of this and a bit of that. It is not just child mortality, but mother mortality (during/after birth) which plummeted with better medicine, thus the same amount of women can bear more children.
Re:The Horrors of Pompeii by vidarh on Saturday July 08, 2023 @06:48AM (#36643191)
You can't look at this without compensating for population growth and get a meaningful comparison. A raw population pyramid is only a reasonable-ish indicator of life expectancies when a population is growing at slow rate.

For a fast growing population you'll always see a significant narrowing by age no matter if people live long or not.