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Middle ages life expectancy12/14/2023 ![]() ![]() It’s similar to counting a tree’s rings to see how many years it lived. Benoitbertrand1974/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SAĪnother way to estimate age is to use a microscope to count the yearly additions of a mineralized tissue called cementum on teeth. There’s physical evidence that plenty of people in the past lived long lives – just as long as some people do today.Ī researcher can count the layers within a tooth that were added over time to determine how old a person lived to be. I’m especially interested in demography – mortality (deaths), fertility (births) and migration – and how it was linked with health conditions and diseases such as the Black Death hundreds or thousands of years ago. I am a bioarchaeologist, which means that I study human skeletons excavated from archaeological sites to understand what life was like in the past. They’re reflecting a common misperception that long life spans in humans are very recent, and that no one in the past lived much beyond their 30s.īut that’s just not true. Rather than being in the prime of life, they think they’d soon be decrepit and dead. ![]() ![]() Setting aside how they envision what it would be like to confront the plague, these undergrads often figure that during the medieval period they would already be considered middle-aged or elderly at the age of 20. What would their lives have been like in the face of this terrifying disease that killed millions of people in just a few years? Every year I ask the college students in the course I teach about the 14th-century Black Death to imagine they are farmers or nuns or nobles in the Middle Ages. ![]()
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