WORLD - Life Span Remains Constant
The wonders of modern medicine and nutrition make it easy to believe we enjoy longer lives than at any time in human history, but we may not be that special after all.
Over the last few decades, life expectancy has increased dramatically around the globe. The average person born in 1960, the earliest year the United Nations began keeping global data, could expect to live to 52.5 years of age. Today, the average is 72.
“There is a basic distinction between life expectancy and life span,” says Stanford University historian Walter Scheidel, a leading scholar of ancient Roman demography. “The life span of humans—opposed to life expectancy, which is a statistical construct—hasn’t really changed much at all, as far as I can tell.”
Life expectancy is an average. If you have two children, and one dies before their first birthday but the other lives to the age of 70, their average life expectancy is 35.
That’s mathematically correct—and it certainly tells us something about the circumstances in which the children were raised. But it doesn’t give us the full picture. It also becomes especially problematic when looking at eras, or in regions where there are high levels of infant mortality. Most of human history has been blighted by poor survival rates among children, and that continues in various countries today.
This averaging-out, however, is why it’s commonly said that ancient Greeks and Romans, for example, lived to just 30 or 35. But was that really the case for people who survived the fragile period of childhood, and did it mean that a 35-year-old was truly considered ‘old’?
-www.bbc.com, 2 October 2018
Commentary
We often quote life expectancy for various countries and time periods, but we must remember that this term actually refers to “life expectancy at birth.” It is strongly influenced by infant (and maternal) mortality in the developing world and in historic time periods. We cannot take for granted that in the Western world, we are blessed with modern medicine, public health, and sanitation that have brought life expectancy much closer to life span.
This BBC article titled, “Do we really live longer than our ancestors?” goes on to mention life spans during various times and places throughout history, and in almost every case it’s a number between 70 and 80. We are reminded of Moses’ words in Psalm 90:10: “The days of our life are seventy years or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.” Interestingly, the modern NRSV translation uses the word “span” here. -By J. Froese
Arno Froese is the executive director of Midnight Call Ministries and editor-in-chief of the acclaimed prophetic magazines Midnight Call and News From Israel. He has authored a number of well-received books, and has sponsored many prophecy conferences in the U.S., Canada, and Israel. His extensive travels have contributed to his keen insight into Bible prophecy, as he sees it from an international perspective.
