There is often confusion in the literature about the difference between life expectancy and lifespan.
Life expectancy is average age of death calculated at birth, with lots of child mortality in the past we often get the impression that people lived short lives. Yet, life expectancy says nothing about lifespan or how old people became.
Life expectancy in ghana is about 45 but if you would visit the country you would see lots of people who are older because total lifespan is not that different from the rest of the world.
So, did people really live short(er) lives in the past?
I read something about humans having a natural lifespan that reaches about 70-80 years if they are not killed by external events despite the century that they lived in, even in ancient times and in pre industrial society's or even in paleolithic times. Could this be true?
There are also references in the bible about the human lifespan being around 75ish years.
Maybe modern humans living in industrial society only get a 5-6 year bonus instead of the decades you would expect if you only look at one statistic as life expectancy?
Hi, not discouraging further contributions here, but it's an "illusion", or more specifically, there's a widespread misunderstanding of the term "life expectancy".
Here's a comment from /u/anthropology_nerd explaining life tables What was the ACTUAL average lifespan before modern medicine?,
... and here's a thread that links to a collection of posts discussing life expectancy in various cultures throughout history: How true is it that average human age was skewed by high infant mortality rates hundreds of years ago?