Life expectancy

Who lives longest?

March 26, 2013

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(Credit: World Life Expectancy)

Life expectancy is an average, and it fluctuates with age as the risks we face change throughout our lifetimes. Both those facts make it a frequently misunderstood statistic, The New York Times reports.

High infant-mortality rates depress the figure substantially. This can lead contemporary observers to the false conclusion that most humans died quite young, even in the not-so-distant past.

Before the Upper Paleolithic, early humans really did die young, most before their 30th birthdays. Then, during the late Stone Age, there was a significant increase in the number of people living into older adulthood./.../