This. The claim that ancient lives were brutish and short, is just a hobbesian concept. That he used to strut his shakey theory.
A significant amount of people reached old age even in the middle ages.
It’s a pet peeve of mine that so many people believe humans used to die of old age at a young age when it’s obviously untrue just from thinking about our modern day experience. Most people hit at least 60-70 before needing any critical medical care, even if they just eat junk food and watch TV all day. What do they imagine it is about modernity that is doubling our life span? The cable TV? The pre-packaged snack foods?
We need to teach people that averages are generally not a meaningful way to compare things, except in the very rare case of them both being normally distributed and also about the same standard deviation. People are taught to think day to day by comparison of averages and it really harms our ability to reason about basic things in daily life.
Where I live (SF Bay) it is extremely windy all summer, and nearly dead calm all winter except when a big storm comes through. Average wind speeds are about the same year round.
