4 ms·
It seems like it’s about statistics, more than anything. Some people can be sedentary and smoke their whole lives and eat lard non stop and still live to be 80.
by moreira 4y ago
It seems like it’s about statistics, more than anything. Some people can be sedentary and smoke their whole lives and eat lard non stop and still live to be 80. Doesn’t mean any of that helped them in any way.
It’s like that for them, too; regardless of their sanitary practices, some people will live to be old. On its own I don’t think it says much about their effectiveness.
Long-lived people have always existed. The difference is in the % of people that make it that far.
- somenameforme 4y agoThat's exactly what I was hitting on. Ancient Greeks living to quite old age were not statistical outliers, but the norm! The only way to explain this with contemporary understanding is to suggest it's just an extremely large survivorship bias, but that seems to difficult to swallow because many of those we know of from Ancient Greece we would likely still know of even had they died decades earlier as well. This [1] study looked at the mean age of Greeks "of renown" from the 5th and 4th century and found the average life expectancy was 71.3 years! There's certainly a class bias, but when we're speaking of times of antiquity all the money it world couldn't buy you what didn't exist. So all that bias would represent is, at best, more or less secure access to food, drink, and other basic necessities. [1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18359748/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18359748/