My colleague Marc Oxenham and I wanted to understand early societies more fully so we developed a method for bringing to light the invisible elderly. This method is applicable only to cemetery populations that have seen little change over the life of the cemetery, and without massive inequality between the inhabitants. That way it can be assumed that the people ate similar foods, and behaved in similar ways with their teeth. One such cemetery is Worthy Park near Kingsworthy, Hampshire, where Anglo-Saxons buried their loved ones some 1,500 years ago. It was excavated in the early 1960s.
We measured the wear on the teeth of these people, and then seriated the population from those with the most worn teeth – the oldest – to those with the least worn. We did this for the whole population, not just the elderly, to act as a control. We then matched them against a known model population with a similar age structure, and allocated the individuals with the most worn teeth to the oldest ages. By matching the Worthy Park teeth to the model population, the invisible elderly soon become visible. Not only were we able to see how many people lived to a grand old age, but also which ones were 75 years or older, and which were a few years past 50.
Well, how many then ? Tell us ! The most important figure of the article is apparently missing. Without telling us what proportion actually made it past 50, the popular idea that most people had significantly shorter lifespans (even discounting infant mortality) could be correct. Nobody really thinks that literally no-one at all survived past 30 or 50; everyone thinks that it was only a few exceptions who managed to do that.
https://aeon.co/ideas/think-everyone-died-young-in-ancient-societies-think-again?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=atom-feed
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