Do we really live longer than our ancestors? | Science and health

In Brazil, the jump was even higher, from 48 to 75.5 years.

The natural conclusion is that both advances in modern medicine and public health initiatives have helped us live longer than ever, to the point that we may not be able to prolong our lives longer than we had done before.

In September 2018, the British government confirmed that at least in the United Kingdom, life expectancy had stopped increasing. And these gains are also decreasing around the world.

The belief that our species might have reached the peak of longevity is also reinforced by some myths about our ancestors: the ancient Greeks or Romans would be surprised to see someone over 50 or 60 years old, by example.

While advances in medicine have improved many aspects of health, it is wrong to think that the length of human life has increased considerably over the centuries, or even millennia.

Life expectancy has not increased so much because we live much longer than in the past. It has increased because many others are living longer.

"There is a fundamental difference between life expectancy and lifespan," says Walter Scheildel, a historian at Stanford University in the United States and one of the leading specialists of the demography of ancient Rome. "The lifespan of humans – contrary to life expectancy, which is a statistical construction – has not changed much to my knowledge."

Life expectancy is average. In a house with two children, where one dies before the first birthday and the other lives until the age of 70, life expectancy is 35 years.

It is mathematically correct – and it certainly tells us something about the circumstances in which these children were created. But that does not tell us the whole situation.

In addition, another problem arises when we badyze epochs or regions in which the infant mortality rate is high. Most of human history has been marked by low survival rates for children, and this reality persists in many countries.

However, when we calculate the average, we usually say that ancient Greeks and Romans lived, for example, between 30 and 35 years.

But was it the maximum age reached by those who had survived the rigors of childhood? Moreover, who was 35 years old at the time could be considered "old"?

If 30 years meant a decrepit old age, old writers and politicians do not seem to agree.

In the early 7th century BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that a man should get married "when he is not less than thirty years old and not much older."

Meanwhile, the "curriculum honorum" of ancient Rome – the succession of posts in the judiciary that a young man aspiring to become a politician – did not even allow him to perform his first function, that of quaestor, before the age of 30. under the Emperor Augustus, the minimum age fell to 25 years, the Roman ruler himself died at 75).

To be a consul, it took at least 43 to eight years more than the minimum age of 35 to occupy the Brazilian presidency.

In the first century, the Roman naturist Pliny dedicated an entire chapter of Natural History to the people who lived the longest. Among them are the consul Valerius Corvinos (100 years old), the wife of Cícero Terentia (103 years old), a woman named Clodia (115 years old – who has had 15 children throughout her life), and l & # Actress Lucceia who played on stage with 100 years.

There are also inscriptions on gravestones and tombs, such as that of a woman who died in Alexandria in the 3rd century BC. "She was 80 years old, but she was able to weave a delicate weaving, "says the epigram.

That does not mean that getting older was easier at the time and now than today.

"Nature, in fact, has not brought more blessing to man than lack of life," Pliny observes. "The senses become opaque, numb limbs, vision, hearing, legs, teeth and organs of digestion all die before us."

He could only remember one person, a musician who lived up to age 105, who considered having a healthy old age. (Pliny reached nearly half of this population and reportedly died from volcanic gas during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius at the age of 56).

In the ancient world, at least, it seems that people could live as much as we do today. But was it common?

In 1994, a study examined all men who lived in ancient Greece or Rome and whose names appear in the Oxford Clbadic Dictionary. Their age of death has been compared to that of the men listed in the latest Chambers biographical dictionary.

Of the 397, 99, they died violently by murder, suicide or battle. Of the remaining 298, those born before age 100 lived on average 72 years. People born after 100 BC lived on average up to 66 years. (The authors speculate that the prevalence of lead plumbing may have led to this supposed shortening of life).

And the average of those who died between 1850 and 1949? Seventy-one years only a year younger than those who lived before 100 years before our era.

Of course, this sampling posed obvious problems. One because everything is about men. Another, because they were all illustrious enough to be remembered in posterity.

The conclusion we can truly draw from this is that these privileged and talented men have had similar life expectancies throughout history – as long as they were not killed first.

According to Scheidel, "this suggests that there must be anonymous people, many more, who lived even more".

But not all experts agree. "There was a huge difference between the lifestyle of a poor man and that of an elite Roman," says Valentina Gazzaniga, a historian at La Sapienza University in Rome. "Living conditions, access to medical treatment and even hygiene – all this was certainly better among the elites."

In 2016, Gazzaniga published a study in which he badyzed more than 2,000 ancient Roman skeletons, all of the working clbad, buried in mbad graves. The average age of death was 30, and this was not a simple misconception statistic: a lot of skeletons were around this age. Many of them showed signs of traumatic effects of forced labor, as well as diseases that we badociate with older ages, such as arthritis.

Men may have suffered many injuries from manual labor or military service.

But women – who were also doing forced labor in the fields – did not have a very different destiny. During the course of history, childbirth, often in poor sanitary conditions, is only one of the reasons why women were at greater risk during the years. fertile. Even the pregnancy itself was a danger.

"We know, for example, that being pregnant negatively affects your immune system because you basically have another person growing up in you," says Jane Humphries, a university historian. Oxford in the United Kingdom. "So you tend to be sensitive to other diseases." In this sense, for example, tuberculosis interacts with pregnancy in a very threatening way. This disease resulted in a higher mortality rate for women than for men. "

Childbirth was also aggravated by other factors." Women often ate less than men, "says Gazzaniga.This malnutrition means that girls often have incomplete pelvic bone development (19659003) "The life expectancy of Roman women has increased with the decline in fertility," says the researcher. "The more fertile the population, the greater the life expectancy of women is short. "

The biggest difficulty in knowing for sure how long our ancestor has lived on average, whether old or prehistoric, is related to the lack of data. The average age of death of ancient Romans, anthropologists usually base themselves on census forms of Roman Egypt.But as these papyri were used to collect taxes, they often underestimated the number of deaths. men, just as they left many babies and women.

The inscriptions on the gravestones, left by thousands by the Romans, are another obvious source. But children were rarely placed in graves, the poor could not afford to be buried and families who died at the same time, such as during an epidemic, for example, had not graves.

And even if it was not the case, the use of these inscriptions poses another problem.

"It takes a number of documents to be able to say that if someone lived up to 105 or 110 years old, it only started very recently," says Scheidel of Stanford. "If someone had actually lived up to the age of 111, this case might not have been known."

As a result, much of what we think we know about statistics of life expectancy in ancient Rome comes from comparisons with other societies. These data indicate that nearly a third of children died before the age of one year and that half of them did not exceed ten years. After this age, the chances have improved considerably. If you were 60 years old, you would probably live up to 70 years old.

Overall, life expectancy in ancient Rome was probably not much different from today 's. He may have been a bit smaller "because we did not have any medicine today, which ends up delaying our death, but not in a radically different way," Scheidel says. "You can have an extremely low average life expectancy, for example because of infant and maternal mortality, and live up to 80 or 90. There are a few fewer, because of the combination of these factors. . "

Of course, this should not be overlooked. Especially if you were a baby, a woman of childbearing age or a worker, it would be far better to choose to live in 2018 than in 18 years. This does not mean, however, that our life expectancy is considerably longer.

The data improve later in human history, governments begin to keep careful records of births, marriages and deaths – mostly noble ones.

These records show that infant mortality has remained high. But if a man was 21 years old and that he had not died by accident, violence or poisoning, he could live almost as much as men today: from 1200 to 1745, 21 years old would live in average between 62 and 70 years old. – except in the 14th century, when bubonic plague reduced life expectancy to 45 years.

Did money or power help? Not always. An badysis of some 115,000 European nobles revealed that kings lived about six years younger than other nobles, such as knights.

By observing county parish registers, historians found that in the 17th century, life expectancy in England was longer for citizens than for nobles.

"In England, aristocratic families had the means to obtain all sorts of material and personal benefits, but the expectation of life at birth among the aristocrats seems to have lagged behind the population in its set until the mid-eighteenth century "says the study. This is probably due to the fact that the royal family preferred to spend most of their time in the cities, where they were exposed to more diseases.

But curiously, when medicine and public health went through a revolution, the elites ended up favoring the rest of the population. At the end of the seventeenth century, English nobles over 25 years of age lived more than non-nobles, even if they stayed in the cities.

In the Victorian era, for example, a five-year-old girl had an average life expectancy of 73 years; a boy, 75 years old.

These figures are not only comparable to ours, but they can be even better. Men of the working clbad (a more accurate comparison) now live around 72 years as women, 76.

"This relative lack of progress is striking, especially given the many environmental disadvantages of the time Victorian and medical care framework at a time when modern drugs, screening systems and surgical techniques were not available, "said Judith Rowbotham of the University of Plymouth and Paul Clayton of Oxford Brookes .

The experts argue that, if we think that we live more than ever today, it is because our records go back to around 1900. What they call a "starting point "misleading" because it 's one of this nutrition has fallen and many men have started smoking.

And if we decided to look further, before a file is kept?

While it is obviously difficult to collect this type of data, anthropologists have tried to replace it by observing some hunter-gatherer peoples of today, such as the Achés of Paraguay and the Hadzas of Tanzania.

They found that while the probability of survival of a newborn at age 15 ranged from 55% for a Hadza boy to 71% for an Aché boy, if a child survived at that age they would live on average 51 and 58 years.

Archaeologists Christine Cave and Marc Oxenham of the Australian National University made similar discoveries. When they badyzed the wear of teeth on the skeletons of Anglo-Saxons buried 1,500 years ago, they found that most of the 174 badyzed came from people under 65 years old – but 16 people also died between 65 and 74 years old. nine who are at least 75 years old.

Our life expectancy may not have changed much, if at all. But that does not detract from the tremendous progress we have made in recent decades that has allowed hundreds of thousands of people to live longer and healthier lives.

It is perhaps for this reason that, when asked when he would have liked to live, Humphries, of Oxford University, did not want to go to school. do not hesitate.