Life expectancy through history, but not skewed by infant mortality?

October 26, 2014 1:53 PM

I want to know how long people usually lived in different historical periods, but all the charts I can find are heavily skewed by infant mortality rates. (See e.g.). Can anyone point me toward a similar break-down that removes infant mortality from the calculations?
posted by SpiralT to Science & Nature (6 answers total)

Try searching for adult life expectancy or life expectancy by age or at age.
posted by fshgrl at 2:02 PM on October 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

You want life expectancy at five years. Here.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 2:27 PM on October 26, 2014 [5 favorites]

Response by poster: If only..., thanks for the link. That's interesting, but not really what I'm looking for, given that they're drawing data from kings, philosophers, artists, political leaders, religious figures -- in other words, people that are definitely not representative of the "average" of their time.
posted by SpiralT at 10:29 PM on October 26, 2014

Am not sure you can get this all of this in one reference unless you be more precise about the region(s) you're interested in and what sort of source data you want to include/exclude.

Considerations include other "skewing" factors, such as death in childbirth, infection (e.g. from plagues and pandemics) and war, the latter of which will be highly regionally-dependent. There's a nice post titled "Life Expectancy in the Middle Ages" here that discusses some of these aspects. Going earlier, the effect of agriculture during the Neolithic period was profound, but farming was not adopted uniformly, meaning that lifespan was similarly regionally-variable during this period.

The only precise numbers are going to come from written, not skeletal, records, which means some data will be skewed towards the rich and royal, particularly for anything dating back more than 200-300 years.

Somewhat less precise (but nevertheless reasonably accurate) life expectancies can be (and have been) determined based on skeletal remains (Paleodemography). But individual studies are generally limited to particular areas, given the geographic differences. Are you interested in the peoples of Japan, South Africa, South America or possibly the Levant?

Finding these references is pretty straight forward. Simply search "Paleodemography" or "Life expectancy" together with your area and time of interest into either Pubmed or Google Scholar.

Best of luck.
posted by kisch mokusch at 6:39 AM on October 27, 2014

If you're willing to do quite a bit of work, see the data at the Human Life-Table Database. See also the Human Mortality Database.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:36 AM on October 27, 2014

Here's a good paper about lifespan (as opposed to life expectancy) of hunter gatherers. The authors conclude that a "normal" human lifespan is roughly seven decades "before which time humans remain vigorous producers, and after which senescence rapidly occurs and people die."
posted by bennett being thrown at 9:08 AM on October 27, 2014