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Re:Why Exercise Is a Miracle Drug by _Algernon_ on Saturday August 02, 2025 @01:27PM (#44769489)
What data are you basing this on? My understanding is that historical life expectancy is only as low as it is because of the immense infant mortality rates. People who survived through childhood tended to live long.
Re:Why Exercise Is a Miracle Drug by thrance on Saturday August 02, 2025 @01:54PM (#44769751)
Longer than is generally thought, but not as long as we do today either.
Re:Why Exercise Is a Miracle Drug by DicIfTEx on Sunday August 03, 2025 @02:35AM (#44774555)
Pretty much. Here's an in-depth look at mortality patterns in pre-modern societies: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...

> One quirk to these model tables I want to note, because it sometimes confuses folks, is that they express ‘life expectancy’ not as a total expected age, but as average years of life expectancy from a given age, so a 25-year-old with 26.6 years of life expectancy is expecting to life to age 51, not just a year and a half.

> What we see in these models is that life expectancy (female:male) at birth is very low, 25:22.8, but after the first year rises dramatically to 34.9:34.1 (note the gender gap narrowing) and by age 5 to 40.1:39.0 (remember to add the five years they’ve already lived). So life expectancy goes up quite a lot over the first several years of life, which is not, intuitively, the pattern we expect: we normally assume the more you’ve lived, the less years you have left.