[ad_1]
In recent decades, life expectancy has increased dramatically worldwide. Anyone born in 1960, when the United Nations began to compile global data, could hope to live up to 52 years and a half. Today, the average is 72.
In Brazil, the jump was even higher, from 48 to 75.5 years now.
The natural conclusion is that advances in modern medicine and initiatives in public health services have helped us live longer than ever, to the point that we may not be able to prolong our lives longer than we have done before.
In September 2018, the British government confirmed that, at least in the life expectancy has stopped increasing.
The belief that our species may 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 years old. or 60, for 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 much because we live much longer than in the past.
"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 largest specialists in 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."
This is mathematically correct – and certainly tells us something about the circumstances in which these children were raised – but that does not give a complete picture.
Moreover, another problem arises when we look at times or regions in which the infant mortality rate is high.Majority of human history has been marked by low survival rates among children, and this reality has remained unchanged in many countries.
However, when we calculate the average, we often say that ancient Greeks and Romans live have, for example., 30 or 35.
But was it the maximum age reached by those who survived the rigors of childhood?
In the early 7th century BCE, the Greek poet Hesiod, author of this book, wrote that a man should get married "when he is not younger than 30, and not much more."
Meanwhile, " Honorary Curriculum " from Ancient Rome – The sequence of positions in the judiciary that a young man aspiring to be a politician should occupy – or even allow him to perform his first function, that of Quaestor before the age of 30 (under Emperor Augustus, the minimum age fell to 25 years old; Roman died at the age of 75.
To be a consul, it was necessary to be at least 43 years old – eight years older than the minimum age of 35 to hold the presidency Brazilian.
There are also inscriptions on gravestones and tombs, such as that of a woman who died in Alexandria in the third century BCE. She was 80, but she was able to weave a delicate weave, says the epigram. That's not to say that aging was easier at this time than it is today.
"In reality, nature has not given more blessing to man than lack of life," Pliny observes. "The senses become opaque, the limbs numb, the vision, the hearing, the legs, the teeth and the organs of digestion die before us."
He could only remember one person, only one. a musician who lived up to 105 years old, as someone who envisioned having a healthy old age. (Pliny accounted for almost half of this figure and would have died from volcanic gas spills during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius at the age of 56.)
In the old world at the least, it seems that people can live as long today
In 1994, a study examined all men who lived in ancient Greece or Rome and whose names appear in the clbadic dictionary of 39. ; Oxford.
Between 397 and 99 years old, they died violently by murder, suicide, or battle, and among the remaining 298, those born before the age of 100 lived on average 72 years. born after 100 years BC lived on average up to 66 years. (The authors speculate that the prevalence of lead plumbing could have led to this alleged shortening of life.)
And the average of those who died between 1850 and 1949 – only 71 years younger than those who lived before 100 years of age
Of course, there were obvious problems with this sampling, one because everything is about men Another, because everyone is have been illustrious enough to remember her in posterity.
The conclusion we can draw is that these privileged and talented men 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 and living longer".
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, 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 skeletons of ancient Rome. working clbad, who were 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 forced labor trauma, 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 also forced labor in the camps – 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 historian at the University of Toronto. 39; Oxford. 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. "
Other factors also aggravated delivery." Women often ate less than men, "says Gazzaniga, an under-nourishment that means pelvic bones are often poorly developed in young people. girls, making it difficult to accomplish work.
"The life expectancy of Roman women has actually increased with the decline in fertility," says the researcher. "The more fertile the population is , the longer the life expectancy of women is short. "
The biggest difficulty is knowing for sure how long our ancestor has lived on average, whether old or new. For example, in trying to determine the average age of death of ancient Romans, anthropologists generally rely on census forms from Roman Egypt, but as these papyri were used to collect taxes, they under – often estimated the number of men – just as they left many babies and women.
The inscriptions on the gravestones, left by the 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 died simultaneously, such as during an epidemic, for example, had no deposit.
And even if it was not the case, there is another problem
"It takes a number of documents to be able to say that if anyone has lived up to 105 or 110 years old, it only started very recently, "says Scheidel of Stanford. "If someone was actually living up to the age of 111, this case might not have been known"
As a result, much of what we 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, the life expectancy in ancient Rome was probably not very different from that of today. 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. These are a little 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. But that does not mean that our life expectancy is considerably longer.
The data improve later in the year History of humanity when governments start to carefully register births, marriages and deaths – in the beginning, mainly of nobles.
These documents 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-year-olds would live on average between 62 and 70 years – except in the 14th century, when bubonic plague reduced life expectancy to an insignificant 45.
Has money or power helped? Not always. An badysis of some 115,000 European nobles revealed that kings lived about six years younger than other nobles, such as knights.
Historians have found that by observing records of parish counties, England "Aristocratic families in England had the means to secure all kinds of material benefits and personal services, but the only thing they could do was to keep it. Life expectancy at birth between the aristocracy seems to have lagged behind the population as a whole until the mid-eighteenth century, "the study says. This is probably due to the fact that royalty preferred to spend most of its time in cities where it was exposed to more diseases.
But curiously, when medicine and public health went through a revolution, the elites were favored by others. Population. At the end of the seventeenth century, English nobles aged 25 and over lived more than non-nobles, even though they remained in the cities.
These figures are not only comparable to ours, but they can be even better Working clbad men (a more accurate comparison) live now around 72 years old as women, 76.
"This relative lack of progress is impressive, especially given the many environmental disadvantages of the Victorian era and the framework of care. at a time when modern drugs, screening systems and surgical techniques were not available, "said Judith Rowbotham of Plymouth University and Paul Clayton of Oxford Brookes.
Experts argue that if we think we are living more than ever today, that's because our records date back to around 1900 – what they call a "misleading starting point" because Was a time when nutrition was falling and many men were starting to smoke
It is obviously difficult to collect this type of data, but anthropologists have tried to replace it by observing some of today's hunter-gatherer peoples, such as the Achés of Paraguay and the Hadzas of Tanzania.
They found that although the probability of survival of a newborn at age 15 ranged from 55% for a Hadza boy to 71% for an Ache boy; if someone survived at that age, he would live on average until the age of 51 and 58 years old.
Archaeologists Christine Cave and Marc Oxenham of the Australian National University made similar findings. 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 extraordinary progress we have made in recent decades, from which hundreds of thousands of people have begun to live more and more healthily.
It is perhaps for this reason that when asked me what time of the past, I would like to have Humphries, from the University of Chicago. 39, Oxford, do not hesitate.
"Absolutely today," she says. "I think women's lives in the past were very unpleasant and difficult – not to say short."
Have you ever watched our new videos on YouTube ? Subscribe to our channel!
https: //www.youtube. com / watch? v = T_yTm_M_qPs
[ad_2]
Source link
