Trigger warning, child death
The most flimsy thing in the mesolithic were children. About 26% didn’t make it to one year old. 40% probably didn’t make it to five years old.
There was a 56% chance they didn’t make it to puberty.
Today we think about getting vaccinated against viruses, but viruses were pretty rare. We lived in small groups of no more than about 150 people. The odds of you coming in contact with an outsider were slim to none Because population density was measured in less than tens of people per mile. But if you managed to find one that was infected you were going to have a bad time.
Every little bacterial infection was life-threatening. Bacteria lived everywhere. They were out to get you. They would hide out in meat and on berries. And they were out to get the children.
Half of all children never reached reproductive age. If they did there was always the risk of death from childbirth. Which was a bigger risk than getting trampled by an animal in a hunt.
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In a way, it’s a wonder we as a species managed to make it as far as we did considering how traumatic childbirth is in humans.
Also I know those statistics remained pretty uniform up until the last few centuries. I spend a lot of time looking into classical antiquity and a LOT of our ideas of “people didn’t live as long in those days” tends to come from all that child death bringing down the median age of death. From what I’ve heard, at least for societies like the ancient Romans, once you made it to puberty you had a pretty decent chance of living to 60 or more. I wonder how true that was for people many thousands of years ago.
That’s the rub. If you lived past puberty then the odds are you were going to live to be 60 to 90 years old. But living that long was a dice roll. I know that without the aid of modern medicine I would have died multiple times before I hit the age of puberty. Because I had recurring bouts of strep throat before I was the age of 13.
