The massive lowering of the bar of “good enough to stay alive”. Life expectancy was consistantly in the 30s up until the 1870s. Simply having kids was life threatening… doing so while malnourished even more so.
Natural selection favors traits that increase the odds of having offspring, as well as those that avoid death before having offspring. Avoiding death is a lot easier than it used to be.
For what it’s worth the average life expectancy was 30-something. That didn’t mean that everyone, or even the mostly everyone, just dropped dead at 30.
It did, however, involve an awful lot of people dying in childhood. Often due to diseases that these days we’ve almost stamped out, but now antivax morons are working hard on bringing back!
Yeah, I at least assumed that was understood with just “expectancy”, obviously people live longer than expectations, and some die unexpectedly young. Key point is if you were given a mission where you must become a baby, and carry on life until you have 6 kids reach the age of 18. But you could chose what time to be born in (but not pick location, class or race), the lowest difficulty mode of that game would almost certainly be after 1950s… and prior to the 1800s would be viewed as very hard mode.
The massive lowering of the bar of “good enough to stay alive”. Life expectancy was consistantly in the 30s up until the 1870s. Simply having kids was life threatening… doing so while malnourished even more so.
Natural selection favors traits that increase the odds of having offspring, as well as those that avoid death before having offspring. Avoiding death is a lot easier than it used to be.
Yes. Thanks for stating these hard facts.
For what it’s worth the average life expectancy was 30-something. That didn’t mean that everyone, or even the mostly everyone, just dropped dead at 30.
It did, however, involve an awful lot of people dying in childhood. Often due to diseases that these days we’ve almost stamped out, but now antivax morons are working hard on bringing back!
Yeah, I at least assumed that was understood with just “expectancy”, obviously people live longer than expectations, and some die unexpectedly young. Key point is if you were given a mission where you must become a baby, and carry on life until you have 6 kids reach the age of 18. But you could chose what time to be born in (but not pick location, class or race), the lowest difficulty mode of that game would almost certainly be after 1950s… and prior to the 1800s would be viewed as very hard mode.