A recent article on LiveScience announced, "Neanderthals Had Similar Life Spans to Modern Humans," which leads me to the thought, "so much for all that penicillin and medical advancement."
Turns out the headline is a bit misleading to the average reader. Modern Humans is not us now, but early modern humans. Still, for all our scientific advancement, our lifespans are not significantly greater than 1000 years ago. Statistically, we appear to be living longer, but that's because we've made great strides in infant mortality. (Lots of babies who don't make it past the first year of life tends to skew the average life expectancy age downward.)
In fact, if you lived past age 15 in 1100, your chances of living to the age of 70 were about the same as they are now.
My favorite line in the article (and the reason I'm posting about it), however, speaks to the fact that the genus homo has a long history of treating its seniors poorly. Nowadays we have questionable nursing homes that smell of urine and disinfectant while the game show network plays at full volume all day long. Back in Neanderthals' time the nomadic lifestyles to search for their next meals "likely mean[t] any older members who could not keep up were left behind to die, and their remains would have been scattered by scavengers and lost from the fossil record."
Sorry, Grandma.
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