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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gaio Macareg" data-source="post: 283489" data-attributes="member: 6341">Interesting quotes, but sadly those researchers have mislead you by leaving in the infant mortality results on the life expectency tables. I ran into the problem over and over in college so forgive me if I seem upset at it during my post, it's not directed at you, but the jerks (please mentally replace that word with something profane. Thank you.) who like to use misleading formulas to make their research more exciting. Looking at the people who survive to be 10 and then survive to be 50, you'll find there is a drastically smaller difference between ancient societies and modern ones. It's all in how you manipulate the numbers in order to make the point you want to convince people of. They like the shock and horror that comes from convincing the public that people only lived to be 20 (not to mention it makes their papers oh so much more publishable), when that's not exactly true. If you made it past childhood, you could expect to live a decently long and healthy life. The 20-25 years comes when you average the people who live to be 70 with the ones who die at the age of 1. Hell your Roman chart even includes stillbirths as a lifetime of 0 years. Those are some really immoral researchers.<a href="http://gened.emc.maricopa.edu/bio/bio181/BIOBK/BioBookpopecol.html" target="_blank">Here's a page</a> and <a href="http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa071497.htm" target="_blank"> a second</a>with some interesting modern charts to compare to your ancient ones. Most 3rd world nations today are perfectly identical to what your sources claim to be "ancient" models (with a vast percentage of the population below 20--the difference being that today they're not dying as children and so we have a massive population explosion among the young), and the modern US's graph is not significantly different from that of Rome (except for the two bubbles caused by the "baby boomers" and their children).The infant mortality seems to be the biggest difference between the Roman graph and developed nations. It's enough that the one percent difference in each age category past the age of 5 years is what means we live to be 70 and the pages you cited claimes they didn't. Meaning if you don't average the age of dead adults in with the age of the dead kids, Romans had comprable lifespans to citizens of the United States in 1997. Personally, I don't care about average age with infant mortality factored in. Take it out and then tell me how old a given person can expect to live.For example, let's play with the numbers shall we? Looking at your first source, over half the Romans who lived to be 10 also lived to be 50. Specifically 9.4% of the population are aged 10 and 5.0% are aged 50. Let's use a fictional town of 10,000 people exactly. That's 940 10-year-olds and 500 50-year-olds. Of those 940 kids, only 440, or just under half, will die before the survivors become the 50-year-old group. In 1997 in the USA you shift from 9.8% to 7.2%. So the same town has 980 10-year-olds and of them some 260 expect to die before hitting the age of 50. Boy, that's a lot of progress: 180 more dead Romans!You'll find the same is true of all ancient populations. Don't get me wrong, there is a big difference (69% more Americans living to be 50 than Romans to be specific), but it's very misleading to say that they had an expected lifespan of 20-25 years.</blockquote>

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