Modern humans currently live more than twice as long as Paleolithic men did. This evolution has happened rapidly over the past two centuries, largely due to improved healthcare and the ability to combat deadly infectious diseases.
According to 2021 data from the World Health Organization, global life expectancy, which has increased successively in recent decades, is currently at 71.4 years.
This number it may not seem like much impressive on the scale of the longest-lived animals, but compared to our own human ancestors, our life expectancy is actually extraordinary.
love a age of death of remains ancient is an imprecise process, but according to most sources, modern humans currently live more than twice as long of Paleolithic cavemen, whose skulls adorn the walls of natural history museums around the world.
Even more impressive is the fact that this evolution is recent and happened with enormous speed. It occurred only in the last two centuries, and it must be mainly to a single factor: improving health careand in particular efforts to combat infectious diseaseswhich were once the most common cause of death.
The Paleolithic Period was a landmark era for the genre Homofamous for being the era in which our ancestors created stone instruments.
This era lasted from about two and a half million years ago until approximately 10,000 BC, and throughout that time, human life expectancy only lasted around three decades.
This reduced value largely resulted from thes infectious diseaseswhich would have been responsible for around 3/4 of human deaths in the Paleolithic, explains the .
Among the most frequent were the diarrheal diseasescaused by pathogens such as E. coli and to Salmonella. Effectively control these diseases our average life expectancy more than doubledbut our species took a long, long time to achieve it.
He retreated before moving forward
One might think that theemergence of urban civilization after the Paleolithic would bring an advance in human life expectancy, but archaeological evidence suggests that,In a first phase, precisely the opposite happened.
Records from Egypt during the time of the Roman Empire indicate that the average life expectancy was down to 20 years.
Once again, the infectious diseases were the main responsible. The fact that urbanization has bringing people closer to each other as never before favored the spread of infections and caused more premature deaths.
One of the main problems of two urban agglomerations of antiquity was the highthe rate of water contamination and its harmful effects, including the proliferation of even more disease-causing pathogens.
The lack of adequate water and sewage treatment meant that taking Bathing could do more harm than good.
In fact, the public baths in cities like Pompeii were filled with the body fluids of bathers, which remained there to ferment in the stagnant water. During a given period in history, there was a better chance of having a long life being wandering nomad than settling in a city.
Another factor to consider is the infant mortality rate extremely high in ancient societies, which distorted life expectancy values.
This two-decade life expectancy in Roman-era Egypt is something deceitfulas anyone who survived childhood would have a good chance of reach 40 years old — still young by today’s standards.
However, the high rate of deaths from infectious diseases among babies has made considerably lower the average.
A leap after the Industrial Revolution
At the beginning of the 19th century, average human life expectancy had only increased about 10 years since the Paleolithic: a discouragingly slow pace of improvement.
As infectious disease epidemics continued to be a frequent cause of death, with cholera, transmitted through untreated sewage, particularly serious in cities like London.
Although the energy sources of the Industrial Revolution changed, this sewage problem persisted during the first decades of the era, until, Finally, things really started to get better.
This was largely due to the germ theorywhich came to reveal the mechanism underlying all terrible diseases transmissible diseases that had decimated humanity throughout our history as a species.
The two scientists who stood out most in this public health revolution were the Englishman John Snow and French Louis Pasteur. Snow gained renown for mapping cholera cases in London during the 1854 epidemic, which led him to identify a local water pump as the root cause of the outbreak.
This triggered efforts to improve urban water treatment and sewage disposal, and boosted the spread of contagion theory across Europe.
As for Pasteur, his experiments on fermentation brought to scientific attention the world of microorganisms and its specific characteristics.
Among the countless microbes that populate our world are precisely the bacteria that had claimed the lives of the majority of the population throughout history.
These works led Pasteur to create the first successful vaccine against cholera, and many scientists consider his work to be the basis on which modern medicine has grownprogressively increasing our life expectancy.
