3 ms·

Sure, I’m sure they enjoyed their life expectancy of under 30 years.

not2b 5y ago
When life expectancy was 30 years, it was because many children didn't live past the first year; still, 70 year olds were common in hunter-gatherer societies.
- contriban 5y ago
  Common doesn’t mean that most people made it. In a world where you can die for a cut, a hunter doesn’t last to be 70 very easily. This is one of those counter-myths that I’ve been seeing too often lately. The comment about dying early made sense: Just because we lived with unprotected sex for the last million years (and we changed genetically due to some viruses that we got along the way) it doesn’t mean that we’re now still willing to bear the consequences. I’m willing to bet that nowadays we have far more sexual partners than we’ve had since we started “society”
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    Seriously? The only person I know my age that’s getting laid is...married to his wife. Where is this moral panic coming from? If anything the new moral panic is young people aren’t having sex at all.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    To your last point, it’s possibly not true if you track what is happening in Japan and now starting in the west. Many people can go their entire lives having the internet as their sole partner.
    - contriban 5y ago
      I don’t think they’re a huge amount of people, at least currently. It looks like about 30% of Americans between 25 and 50 have never been married. That means at least 70% of that group has been married, more will marry in their lifetimes, and likely a large amount of people fornicate out of wedlock. That indicates that the vast majority of people has at least one sexual partner, with many having a lot more thanks to sexual liberation. For the record, I’m not saying that this is a bad thing at all. I was just alluding to the fact that we can’t compare life and expectations of safety to what it was even 100 years ago, let alone over “millions of years”
  - JohnWhigham 5y ago
    This is one of those counter-myths that I’ve been seeing too often lately. As opposed to people being ignorant about statistics and constantly parroting crap like "people only lived to 30 before modern medicine"?
tsimionescu 5y ago
Irrelevant - none of the STDs that have survived to this day and that also existed in prehistoric times would have been a major cause of death, except perhaps as complications in child birth.

When life expectancy was 30 years, it was because many children didn't live past the first year; still, 70 year olds were common in hunter-gatherer societies.

contriban 5y ago
Common doesn’t mean that most people made it. In a world where you can die for a cut, a hunter doesn’t last to be 70 very easily. This is one of those counter-myths that I’ve been seeing too often lately. The comment about dying early made sense: Just because we lived with unprotected sex for the last million years (and we changed genetically due to some viruses that we got along the way) it doesn’t mean that we’re now still willing to bear the consequences. I’m willing to bet that nowadays we have far more sexual partners than we’ve had since we started “society”
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  Seriously? The only person I know my age that’s getting laid is...married to his wife. Where is this moral panic coming from? If anything the new moral panic is young people aren’t having sex at all.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  To your last point, it’s possibly not true if you track what is happening in Japan and now starting in the west. Many people can go their entire lives having the internet as their sole partner.
  - contriban 5y ago
    I don’t think they’re a huge amount of people, at least currently. It looks like about 30% of Americans between 25 and 50 have never been married. That means at least 70% of that group has been married, more will marry in their lifetimes, and likely a large amount of people fornicate out of wedlock. That indicates that the vast majority of people has at least one sexual partner, with many having a lot more thanks to sexual liberation. For the record, I’m not saying that this is a bad thing at all. I was just alluding to the fact that we can’t compare life and expectations of safety to what it was even 100 years ago, let alone over “millions of years”
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  This is one of those counter-myths that I’ve been seeing too often lately. As opposed to people being ignorant about statistics and constantly parroting crap like "people only lived to 30 before modern medicine"?

tsimionescu 5y ago

Irrelevant - none of the STDs that have survived to this day and that also existed in prehistoric times would have been a major cause of death, except perhaps as complications in child birth.