Earlier quoted context omitted.
He mentions that people back then lived around 35 years. I recall reading it's a mistaken interpretation of the average age, while many people died infants adults actually easily lived to 70+ yo. Is it true and he made the same mistake or am I thinking about a different period in history?
These statistics regularly make it sound like everyone was dying off around 30. In reality, it is due to infant mortality rates. Once you make it past a certain age (10-15 years) your life expectancy shoots up into the 40-60's easily. However, when you average the population out, those infant deaths tank the average life expectancy. I'm not surprised they glossed over this, most researchers do, because they don't wan…
If you don't mind clarifying just a bit. What types of religious folks would get upset about a professor in a course (for a scientific discipline they presumably want to do well in no less) describing the very real history of terrible infant mortality across pretty much all premodern cultures and societies? Why would this even be a problem for them? Daily life in the past was known to be very harsh, even the bible itself (among other religious texts) alludes to that constantly.