European Life Expectancy Comparable? Now or When?
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No.
Life Expectancy has a very clear definition. It is the average number of years that a newborn can expect to leave based on current conditions.
Every pre-twentieth century society studied has shown infant mortality rates that would preclude such life expectancies. For instance, here is a study of ancient Roman tomb inscriptions that shows an infant mortality rate of almost 40%, and if calculated as it is today, gives a "life expectancy" of only 20 years. And this among people important enough to get a grave! (i.e. we're not counting slaves or exposed infants here.)
Since life Expectancy is an average, this massive infant mortality is going to skew it young. This confuses people as they often instinctually think of a life expectancy of 35 meaning that most people drop dead on their 35th birthday. But when 40% of a population dies at age zero, you can have a lot of seventy year olds running around and still have such a low life expectancy.
It should also be noted that historically speaking, it wasn't just infants who died in childbirth. Giving birth was quite dangerous for the mother, something which is clearly not taken into account in these studies of famous men. That also skews the life expectancy down dramatically.
You can also see that this is very obviously the case in that when infant mortality was dramatically reduced, the population exploded, doubling roughly every 40 years. There was no instance of that sort of explosive growth in any prior historical time, therefore, there was never a time prior with post 19th century life expectancies.
Determining the actual life expectancy of an ancient civilization is hard. One common method is to look at the bones found in the cemeteries of these societies and use medical knowledge to estimate age at death. This itself can be tricky, and often they ignore children, coming up with a separate life expectancy at age 15, which ignores infant/child mortality. Wikipedia has a good summary of this, including for ancient Greece, and for that civilization estimates that a 15 year old has a life expectancy of "37–41". I.e the average person who made it to adulthood would die in their fifties. For reference, the average American has a life expectancy of 61 years at 15.
So even if you completely ignore infant/child mortality, the modern world still exceeds a "healthy" ancient culture by two decades in life expectancy.
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Source: stackoverflow.com
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