You might find this article intereasing..http://queryblog.tudorhistory……cy-in.html

Boring stuff alert..

It’s a mattter of stastics.

When we talk about averge life expectancy, we are looking at the 3 different types of average…the mean ( where you add up all the numbers or representible sample and divide by the number of sample points) which gives us the quoted range of 35-45. The average being 40 with a plus/minus of 5 yrs.

Then we have the mode which in this case is the age at which most people died….because this wasn’t recorded in the overwhelming number of pple who were alive at the time…we can only guess , and guess badly what age that might be.

Finally we have the median..again it’s hard to have an exact result since he don’t know all the figures but it would be the middle value of all the results written down.
http://www.purplemath.com/modu…..anmode.htm

Common sense tells us that people don’t just die off at 45 ( except in Logans Run when it was 30…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L…..%28film%29).

The stats are skewed by a very high childhood mortality rate, upto 90% of children died of diseases, starvation , diarrhea and causes like a simple infection which we have the ability to cure quickly an easily now.

Starvation was high amongst the lower calsses. War-fare and pregnancy/chld-birth caused massive deaths amongst adults in the prime of life. But for most people, if you live to be 15 , the chances were high that you are able to live another 40, 50 or sometimes 60 or 70 years more.