On a side note, while doing research I learned that the reason women go through menopause is because the older a woman is when she gives birth, the greater chance she has of dying. Studies on modern hunter-gatherers show women reaching menarche at an average age of 16, and giving birth to their first child around 19. This means that children would have been spaced at least 3 years apart: 2 years of breastfeeding plus 9 months of pregnancy. once again explains it perfectly well:Īssuming that a Paleolithic woman wanted to maximize her baby’s chance for survival, she probably would have breastfed it for at least 2 years. So now that we know people in a H&G lived a decently long life, we should look at reproduction rates. As the image below exemplifies, the high infant and juvenile death rates are calculated into the average age of death, even though relatively few people actually die at that age. The reason why many people believe Hunter and gatherers didn't live past 30 years of age is because of how we find the average life expectancy. Since I am on a mission to find the answer to my 2 questions ( Were people better off as Hunter-Gatherers and is it too late to go back to that lifestyle if we wanted?) I need to find the truth about H&G mortality, morbidity, reproduction, and overall health in order to be completely thorough.Īccording to the website, 30-40% of hunter-gatherer children died before they reached age 15, but if someone survived that long, they could expect to live into their late 60's or even their early 70's. Before doing research, I believed the main causes of Hunter-gatherer deaths were disease, violence, and starvation. ![]() Fortunately for our primal kin, this was not the case. Sadly, when most people think of Cavemen, like the ones pictured above, they too think that nobody lived past the age of 30 in ancient paleolithic times.
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