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While your point is absolutely true, note that life expectancy shouldn't be taken as the literal age most people die. It is the expected value of your age at death. Just like the expected value of a coin flip being heads is 0.5, but no coin is ever 0.5 heads.

Life expectancy at birth in the times before modern medicine has always been dragged down significantly by the huge rate of infant mortality. It was more common for a family to have 1-2 dead small children in their past than not. People who lived past 5 or 10 or so would often live to see 70 or so, and 80 or 90 year olds were not unheard of.



That's the nice thing about statistics, we will always have outliers to cherry pick. One can play with the graph at will, but also US men life expectancy at 5yo increased from 55 to 80 in the last 150 years: https://mappinghistory.uoregon.edu/english/US/US39-01.html. That's without infant mortality.




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