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@emollick You're overall point here is extremely important, but this one tweet has several major conceptual errors.Permalink On twitter.com
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@emollick Lifespan ≠ life expectancy. People have perhaps as always lived to be grandparents. This is a graph with one data points on its left two thirds. And that one is an ideological construction rather than an unbiased sample.Permalink On twitter.com
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@emollick There's huge variability in life expectancy pre-1700, caring across time, rural/urban, región etc.Permalink On twitter.com
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@emollick Because of the role of epidemics and zoonotic diseases, we can expect many of the factors weighing down life expectancy to be concentrated in those agricultural, urban-centered (but majority rural), and state-governed socitiees where death records and/or calculations r possible.Permalink On twitter.com
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@emollick The systematic calculation of birth statistics is just as recent as modern medicine, so ancient studies require detailed accounts of single families, graveyard censuses, other indirect measures.On twitter.com
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@emollick These things are nearly impossible outside of state-centers like the central Roman empire, but most people lived outside of state rule 2,000 years ago.Permalink On twitter.com
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@emollick What we can do is look systematicaloy at lifespans (how many elders are buried), nutritional stress, and some measures of child mortality (without being able to assume that burials are an unbiased sample of all deaths).Permalink On twitter.com
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@emollick These measures suggest a serious cost to life span and life expectancy from the forager to agricultural transition, a transition still very much underway for some people's even in the 20th century.Permalink On twitter.com
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@emollick So as an anthropologist, when I see a single linear extrapolation from very low to fairly low for pre-1800 life expectancy, I see someone assuming a story about modernity, not building one from either data or scholarship on the pre-modern world.Permalink On twitter.com
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@emollick Good-natured and curious people like the OP here thing they are "zooming out" but are really looking at the horizon painted on the inside of the modern boat they are sitting in.Permalink On twitter.com
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@emollick Unfortunately, this is a wide-ranging problem for @TheWorldInData, which also projects the share of democracies back to zero before 1770. Many, many indigenous societies and city-state councils would like a word with that.Permalink On twitter.com