historical lifespan discourse from reading this biography but some people have overcompensated from “average lifespan being 35 in xyz era meant that most people died as young adults and it was very unusual to see people live to be elderly” to “average lifespan only reflects a high infant mortality and if you survived childhood you would likely live to be at least seventy”
people absolutely lived into their 70s and 80s regularly in Ye Olden Times. They also died of disease or other natural causes in their 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s at a significantly higher rate than today. You also see a lot more people dealing with significant health decline and disability in what we would now consider middle age. People in their fifties wouldn’t have been considered on death’s door by any means but they would likely have been considered “old” in a way people that same age aren’t today.
like I’m thinking about Elizabeth I of England, who died at 69 and was absolutely considered an old woman for the time period. That’s more than a decade shorter than the average lifespan for a woman in the UK today, and if you look at her family even ruling out the people who were executed, the only person among her half-siblings, her father and all his wives, all of her aunts and uncles, and all four grandparents who lived past 60 was Thomas Boleyn. And most of those people died before 50! And while the Tudor line was definitely snakebit in some respects I don’t think this was unusual overall. If you were living in a developed country today and only one person in the last 3 generations of your family had lived past 60 you would be profoundly unlucky.
