In the pre-modern, poor world life expectancy was around 30 years in all regions of the world. The estimates by historian James Riley shown here suggest that there was some variation, between different world regions, but in all world regions life expectancy was well below 40 years.
With rare exceptions, life expectancy has been on the rise in the US: it was 47 years in 1900, 68 years in 1950, and by 2019 it had risen to nearly 79 years.
The average lifespan at the time was around 35 years. Over the last 200 years, U.S. life expectancy has more than doubled to almost 80 years (78.8 in 2015), with vast improvements in health and quality of life.
In Ancient Greece and Rome, scientists estimate that the average life expectancy was just 20 to 35 years. Thanks to modern medicine and improved hygiene, these numbers have more than doubled, with Americans living about 78.6 years on average.
Hacettepe University Anthropology Department lecturer Professor Yılmaz Selim Erdal said the examinations on the skeletons revealed that people lived to 40 years of age 5,000 years ago. “The life expectancy of the Early Bronze Age and its contemporaries is around 35-40 years. Infant and child mortality is very high.
Rough Trends for Ancient Human Life Spans
The same research shows that starting about 30,000 years ago at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, the average lifespan began to push past 30 years.
AKSARAY - Anatolia News Agency. Excavations in Aşıklıhöyük have reached the bottom layer, revealing information about the first settled life that began there 10,300 years ago. The more than 80 skeletons found in the area show the approximate average lifespan of the people living there then was between 25 and 30 years.
The first encounters began about 8000 generations ago in the Paleolithic era when approximately 75% of deaths were caused by infection, including diarrheal diseases that resulted in dehydration and starvation. Life expectancy was approximately 33 years of age.
According to one tradition, Epimenides of Crete (7th, 6th centuries BC) lived nearly 300 years.
Humans have a maximum known lifespan of about 120 years, but this was excluded from their calibration data for being too much of an outlier. According to the paper, which was published in Nature Scientific Reports, “this does not reflect the variability [of] the true global average lifespan (60.9–86.3 years).”
Ancient Times Through Pre-Industrial Times
And, this is a misconception given that many people in ancient and pre-industrial times lived just as long (and sometimes longer) than many adults living today. But from the perspective of a population as a whole, life expectancy from about 6,000 BC to 100 BC was low.
With the patriarchs living such long lives (Adam 930 years, Seth 912, Enos 905, Cainan 910, Mahalaleel 895, Jared 962, Enoch 365 not out, Methuselah 969, Lamech 777, Noah 950 - Genesis c5 & c9), the ancients could stand a lot of infant mortality and still have an average span of 70.
Between 1900 and 2020 the average life expectancy in the United State rose by more than 30 years due, in part, to multiple public health measures. Infectious diseases deaths began to decline after the U.S started chlorinating drinking water in 1908 to kill off water-born illnesses like typhoid, cholera and dysentery.
Jeanne Calment
Jeanne Louise Calment, the world's longest living person (who died at the age of 122) was born in Arles, France on February 21, 1875 and died on August 4, 1997 in a nursing home in Arles.
Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy during the 12th–19th centuries was approximately 55 years. If a person survived childhood, they had about a 50% chance of living 50–55 years, instead of only 25–40 years.
For example, in 1850 in England and Wales life expectancy at birth was 42, but over 25% of children died before the age of five. For those who survived, life expectancy rose to 57. Moreover, 10% of people born in 1850 lived to over 80.
Zaro Agha enjoyed extreme popularity while was alive. He was born in 1774, according to population registers, and died on June 30, 1934 (Figure 1). He died at the age of 157 years, and is claimed to be one of the longest-living humans ever [3, 4].
10,000 years ago: European males – 162.5cm (5 ft 4 inches). A dramatic reduction in the size of humans occurred at this time. Many scientists think that this reduction was influenced by global climatic change and the adoption of agriculture.
When the high infant mortality rate is factored in (life expectancy at birth) inhabitants of the Roman Empire had a life expectancy at birth of about 22–33 years.
Back in the Iron Age, the life expectancy wasn't very long. The average life expectancy was around 25 years old. In the UK, the current average is around 81 years old.
The Social Security Administration's middle-range forecasts indicate that in 2050 e(0) will be 80.0 and 83.4 years for males and females, respectively (table 2). The Census Bureau (CB) forecasts that in 2050 e(0) for males and females will be 80.9 and 85.3 years, respectively.
The first human ancestors appeared between five million and seven million years ago, probably when some apelike creatures in Africa began to walk habitually on two legs. They were flaking crude stone tools by 2.5 million years ago. Then some of them spread from Africa into Asia and Europe after two million years ago.
Humans' life expectancy (average) is 70-85 years. However, the oldest verified person (Jeanne Clement, 1875-1997) lived up to 122 years. As a person ages, the telomeres (chromosome ends) tend to become shorter in every consecutive cycle of replication. Also, bones start getting weaker by reducing in size and density.