Talk:Life expectancy

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Graph of Life Expectancy by Region

The current graph has two labels for 1960-1965 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#/media/File:Life_Expectancy_at_Birth_by_Region_1950-2050.png).

I've created another graph https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LifeExpectancy.png based on 2017 data from https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/DVD/Files/1_Indicators%20(Standard)/EXCEL_FILES/3_Mortality/WPP2017_MORT_F07_1_LIFE_EXPECTANCY_0_BOTH_SEXES.xlsx I haven't updated the main page because I'm not sure if the quality is good enough.

Life expectancy in Vedic India is Inaccurate

Currently in the table under life expectancy Variation Over Time there is a row on Vedic India that states life expectancy at birth was 50. This seemed shockingly high for a time period around 1000 BCE so I followed the source to learn a bit more. This is the article that is linked as a source right now: https://indiafuturesociety.org/longevity-and-the-indian-tradition/. It is published on the India Future Society and written by Ilia Stambler. However, there is no mention of an average lifespan in Vedic India anywhere in that article, other than reference to Vedic texts that say life can be prolonged to 100 years, but they also then say it can be expanded to 500 or 800 years so I don't think this is a historic record and certainty not an average life span for the time. I looked a bit more into Stambler's "A History of Life-Extensionism In The Twentieth Century" but this text was too long for me to read the whole thing so I just found a PDF and searched for any time Vedic showed up and once again found nothing. Turning to Google the only article that mentions this 50-80 year lifespan for Vedic India is this article: https://staffinfo.in/what-are-the-lifespans-of-people-in-vedic-india. This however has no listed author or sources and contradicts itself by first saying lifespan was 20-30 years and then later saying it was 50-80 years.

I have not been able to find an actually paper or article that discusses Vedic Indian lifespans, but I am fairly sure that the currently listed range of 50-75 is incorrect and likely should be removed. Taxxor (talk) 21:27, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Of course it's nonsense; Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica's >40 is dubious, and 60 attached to Pre-Champlain Canadian Maritimes is just laughable, if you read the details in the column right hand side, they hint such estimates are based on a 17th century explorer and "explained" by an our days' "Miꞌkmaq elder, author, columnist, and human rights activist".Knižnik (talk) 18:48, 2 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've added McCaa's more sensible results to the Mesoamerica entry. The author of the 40+ estimate seems to churn out popular history titles (mostly science-related so far as I can see) on an epic scale, so while I wouldn't want to deny the guy his livelihood it doesn't seem of particular scholarly weight. The Champlain figure is of course ludicrous, and shouldn't be there. Quantist (talk) 21:43, 27 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Table on Life Expectancy at Birth 13th Century

Is this the normal though? The majority of people died well before these ages, though. I don’t think the citation states this, though.

“The table above gives the life expectancy at birth among 13th-century English nobles as 30–33, but having surviving to the age of 21, a male member of the English aristocracy could expect to live: 1200–1300: to age 64 1300–1400: to age 45 (because of the bubonic plague) 1400–1500: to age 69 1500–1550: to age 71” Lady Meg (talk) 08:20, 28 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Statistics

I don't like the way this article handles the statistics. "Human life expectancy is a statistical measure of the estimate of the average remaining years of life at a given age." is the article's first sentence and I don't like it. Life expectancy is NOT measured, it is derived. If it were measured, it would only be available after the death of 50% of the given population. I think it would be better to say that a LE is, for a given population, the duration (usually measured in years) at which it is estimated that 50% of the population will have died and the other 50% will have survived. As a secondary issue, it's well known that the use of the statistical "average" (mean) is questionable (i.e. not particularly useful) when the population distribution diverges significantly from the normal (Gaussian) distribution. Because of historical high infant mortality, I question the VALUE of the tables listing the averages and there's a whole lot of them here. Even today, mortality is higher in the first 2 post-natal years than it is subsequently, which skews the distribution. For instance, in a population of 10 newborns, if 3 die in the first year of life (at an average age of 0.5 yrs) and the other 7 live till they're 90, then the population's "average" LE is 63 (63.15 to be precise) and yet that number is of negligible use to most anyone. This issue should be made quite explicit here.98.22.50.44 (talk) 04:34, 26 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]