
Think everyone died young in ancient societies? Think again - diodorus
https://aeon.co/ideas/think-everyone-died-young-in-ancient-societies-think-again
======
quotemstr
Human lifespan has increased since ancient times, but not by _that_ much. The
idea that adults died at 30 is absurd, but persists everywhere anyway, mostly
because it flatters us in the present.

Look: a lot of sensational stuff about history is in fact bullshit. I recently
read an article that demonstrated to my satisfaction that the whole "Easter
Islander chopping down the last tree" idea is in fact fantasy and that rats,
not people, ended up deforesting the place. Isn't it a shame that such a
poetic example of the hubris of man ends up not actually being true?

In reality, the past was pretty much like the present, and people today are
pretty much like those of the past. Theories that rely on our ancestors being
somehow obviously stupid or short-lived or morally deficient fall short of
explaining the real world. If you actually _read_ the first-hand accounts of
people from ancient times, you'll find, well, people, with all the usual
insecurities and foibles and temptations that exist today. (See the beautiful
and sensitive correspondence between Eloisa and Abelard.)

To risk making a broader point: I reject the whig-historical attitude in which
the development of humanity is some kind of inexorable progression from an
awful past to a benevolent present. In reality, the only progress is
scientific --- physical laws, with numbers, that you write down and that work
via _math_. Everything else is just a matter of fashion and taste, and there's
no guarantee that our descendants will agree that what we consider "progress"
is in fact good and right.

~~~
barrkel
There's an unjustified leap from the concerns of individuals in their daily
lives to the concerns of society as a whole in your post, and it casts a
severe political shadow over your post.

Individuals out of sight of the state or their overlords may have similar
experiences in different ages, but there are also people who don't exist near
the median who are persecuted to different degrees; not to mention that wealth
distribution can also be radically different. These are also differences
between modern societies, and may thus easily be inferred for past societies
too. And your free choice of society today is not arbitrarily based in fashion
or taste.

Consider telling Oscar Wilde that there's been no progress since his day, and
he was merely a victim of fashion!

~~~
michaelscott
I think parent's point is that the "progress of society" is subjective and not
necessarily absolutely "good" or "evil". The Aztecs were technologically very
advanced to the benefit of their people, but ritually practiced vast human
sacrifice.

The progress is also not necessarily linear; Oscar Wilde would've no doubt
preferred ancient Greece to his own time, about 2000 years later, when it
comes to their attitude toward social progression. The sciences, by contrast,
do tend to show unequivocal progress because they're essentially our growing
understanding of the universe.

~~~
barrkel
I don't accept that justice is subjective. Some societies are objectively more
just.

I agree that progress is not linear. Science also: people forget things, and
are sometimes wiped out and their records lost.

~~~
wilsonnb2
Why do you think some societies are objectively more just, and what definition
are you using for "just"?

------
simonebrunozzi
Most important difference: life expectancy at birth, vs life expectancy as an
adult.

~~~
olliej
Yup this is another article going “we aren’t living longer we’ve just stopped
<5 years olds dying as often”

~~~
0xcde4c3db
Incidentally, life expectancy at 65 in multiple countries has been slowly
creeping up over the past ~50 years, perhaps longer. Last I heard, nobody
really had a good explanation as to why.

~~~
ENGNR
I like to think it's the slow death of the concept of retirement

Work is purpose so long as it's engaging, and people with purpose do things to
keep themselves going

~~~
laumars
I'm yet to meet anyone retired who says "I wish I was still working". Quite
the opposite in fact.

~~~
alsetmusic
> I'm yet to meet anyone retired who says "I wish I was still working". Quite
> the opposite in fact.

My brother and I both shared a fear that our father would waste away and die
after retirement (he is extremely driven). It turned out that he “never has
enough time” for all the projects he creates for himself post-retirement. He
wrote a book, researches the family tree, travels, etc. It was surprising how
much he wants, and finds ways to, remain active. I don’t think we were wrong
to expect him to need an outlet. We simply did not anticipate that he would
create his own.

------
marcus_holmes
Couple of things stood out:

1\. Tooth wearing as a measure of age is complicated by bread. Saxon-era bread
contains a lot of grit because it's ground between actual stones. Eating
gritty bread wears down teeth. So a 30-year-old who ate bread their whole life
would have teeth wear comparable to a much older person in a population that
either didn't eat bread, or ate non-gritty bread (like we do today). We do
know the Saxons were big bread-eaters. We don't know what population was used
as the control for TFA.

2\. The "grooming tool" thing is a little strange. The grooming tools appear
as a set in the late Romano-British period, and vary between individuals, but
are generally composed of tweezers, nail-cleaning blade, snips, a little spoon
perfect for cleaning wax from ears, and similar stuff. They appear to have
been worn dangling from the belt by a thong, carried around routinely like a
Swiss army knife. It's reasonable to assume that at some point in your life,
you got a set of them, either as a gift or because you could, and you carried
on wearing them ever afterwards. So, yes, older people are more likely to have
them ;) But not necessarily because old people were "higher status" or more
into personal grooming.

------
Nursie
I'm not seeing any actual figures here.

My assumption has always been that infant mortality was a huge factor, but
also that adult life expectancy was shorter. Perhaps not 40 years shorter, but
shorter nonetheless because of disease and infection.

I'm not actually seeing anything much to contradict this here.

~~~
ItsMe000001
In this lecture "Return of the Microbes" the professor of medicine mentions in
passing that in Victorian Britain a male adult had an slightly higher life
expectancy than a male adult in today's Britain. He excludes children but also
women for good reason (child birth used to be very risky).

[https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/return-of-
the-...](https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/return-of-the-microbes-
how-infections-are-once-more-taking-over)

~~~
Nursie
While that's interesting, I'm not sure it's really proven, he mentions it in
passing and gives a figure for only a single town, I suspect cherry picked.
And I've been to Blackpool, I'm hardly surprised the life expectancy there
isn't up to much...

I find the second graph here much more compelling, which shows across the
country that there has been a steady improvement over time from 1841 to the
present -
[https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/articles/howhaslifeexpectancychangedovertime/2015-09-09)

------
ojosilva
> And some things about the past, such as men being valued for their power and
> women for their beauty, have changed little.

I couldn't disagree more. Maybe in more primitive societies it hasn't - yet -
but in Anglo-Saxon communities this is exactly what has and is changing. Today
_both_ women and men are praised for not only their power, but intelligence,
integrity, communication and art among many other traits. As well as both men
and women are praised today for their beauty, style and charm.

I can't believe such interesting article could get it so wrong in its
conclusion.

------
southphillyman
Interestingly, I grew up thinking the exact opposite. In the Torah Methuselah
is mentioned as having lived 900+ years.

------
contingencies
Alternate title: _Ms. Cave on Cavemen_

------
TangoTrotFox
This is one thing that really changed my view on healthfulness. Here [1] is a
list of Ancient Greeks. Looking at the age of death ( _for those that did not
die in things such as war_ ) does not really look all that different from
modern society. But for all of the Greeks wonder and ingenuity, they remained
mostly completely ignorant of medicine and illness. Miasma Theory [2]
persisted as the dominant medical view throughout their civilization.

Water 'purification' in most cases (on occasion it was boiled) did nothing to
remove the tasteless toxins that can cause illness and water was mostly just
judged by how clear it looked and how it tasted/smelled. Food safety again
being something of a sniff/taste test. Vaccines of course would not be
invented for thousands of years. Some of the quirks of their civilization
included shared butt wiping sponges at public toilets - you'd clean off the
sponge using either running water, or on occasion a bucket of vinegar. And so
on.

The point of this is that if we provided these Ancient Greeks with nothing but
urgent life-saving emergency care from modern technology, it's highly likely
that their life expectancy would dwarf ours of today. So what exactly was it
in their culture that we've lost? They did so many things so differently that
we can probably all kick in some confirmation bias to support our own personal
hypotheses for some particular subset. But I prefer to just look at things
holistically and consider that aiming to emulate their lifestyles is probably
a better overall way to aim for a long and healthy life than is relying so
heavily on medicine and technology.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ancient_Greeks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ancient_Greeks)

[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory)

\---------------

EDIT: Just, completely coincidentally, saw another related article here [3].
Anyhow, it provides an important datum: _" More than 23 percent of Americans
took three or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days, according to a 2017
CDC estimate. Furthermore, 39 percent over age 65 take five or more, a number
that’s increased three-fold in the last several decades. There are about 1,000
known side effects and 5,000 drugs on the market, making for nearly 125
billion possible side effects between all possible pairs of drugs. Most of
these have never been prescribed together, let alone systematically studied,
according to the Stanford researchers."_

[3] - [http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-predict-the-side-effects-
of...](http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-predict-the-side-effects-of-millions-
of-drug-combinations)

~~~
batiudrami
"The point of this is that if we provided these Ancient Greeks with nothing
but urgent life-saving emergency care from modern technology, it's highly
likely that their life expectancy would dwarf ours of today."

This is something you can't possibly determine. Ancient Greeks famous enough
to have their own Wikipedia pages may not have had penicillin but on balance
they certainly would have lived easier lives than peasants who worked years of
hard labour just to survive, and would have lived longer because of it. It is
also, quite literally, survivorship bias - people who lived to be older had
more time to achieve things and become notable enough to make Wikipedia.

The thing with getting old, as noted in the article, is that past a certain
age if one thing doesn't get ya, another thing probably will. Modern medicine
is not a buff which will add +X years to all humans regardless of
circumstance, it is just about staving off the first few things which try and
kill you - and that's why, by all accounts (including this article), life
expectancy is longer now than it was in the past.

And for the record boiling water works just fine at killing bacteria living in
it. It's not magic and if your water is still full of arsenic you'll still
die, but it's much better than nothing.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
Right, I am not talking about the peasants of the time. 'We', as in the
masses, more readily associate with the peasants than the aristocracy but in
reality the average person today lives a life that's certainly more luxurious,
in terms of things, than the aristocracy of the time. In terms of objective
luxuries, people today have vastly more: reliable indoor plumbing, easy and
rapid transportation, consistent and practically unlimited running water, air
conditioning, practically unlimited access to whatever sorts of food (even
exotic) you care to purchase, and much more. So entitled have we become that
it feels kind of silly to call those things luxuries!

The life of the luxurious Ancient Greek would have likely been more
interesting due to power and prestige, but they did not have objectively
better lives in terms of 'things' than even an average individual today. And
now a days I think it goes without saying that the average person exerts
substantially less energy per day than even our luxurious Ancient Greeks did.
Lives are much easier.

Another interesting thing is also not all of the Ancient Greeks you know were
living lives of luxury, even by standards of their time. Socrates was born to
a stonemason, served in the military, and lived his later life in voluntary
poverty - offering up 100 drachmae as a punishment for the allegations that
would lead to his execution. 100 drachmae was 1/5th of his entire life's
wealth. For some scale, an unskilled worker would earn around 1 drachma a day,
a skilled worker would earn around 5 drachma a day. He was executed at age 71,
still in extremely good health.

\---

And yeah, on the boiling - I was stating that they did on occasion genuinely
purify their water. However, the sniff/taste test was the norm with boiling
the occasional exception.

~~~
lylecubed
> And now a days I think it goes without saying that the average person exerts
> substantially less energy per day than even our luxurious Ancient Greeks
> did. Lives are much easier.

That right there could be your reason. The human body was not designed to be
stagnant. I read recently that the whole reason for the evolutionary
development of brains in both animals and humans is to facilitate complex
movement. Several studies done throughout the decades show a correlation
between greater physical activity and better academic/learning results. The
ancient greeks also believed there was a connection between improving the body
and improving the mind.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsVzKCk066g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsVzKCk066g)

------
scarejunba
TLDR: evidence suggests that humans are bathtub curved.

~~~
taeric
Also that we have actually done a decent job removing many of the old early
killers, no? Anti septics have made many old death notes non existent.

~~~
frockington
It always amazes me when to think that until Lister walking from a autopsy to
a birth with no washing in between was never thought of twice. It's one of
those things that seems so obvious today but wasn't in practice until
recently. Much like sun exposure and smoking causing cancer

~~~
jaclaz
>until Lister

Actually, the "pioneer", a bit earlier than Joseph Lister:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lister](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lister)
was Ignaz Semmelweis:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis)

~~~
frockington
Thanks for the link, it was a good read. Most surprising part was his friend
"who had been accidentally poked with a student's scalpel" dying just from
that. Absolutely crazy the amount of death just from improper sterilization

