Paleoanthropologists have unearthed a hominid skeleton in the Ethiopian region of East Africa, which was found to belong to the southern ape, a female skeleton that had given birth to a child, but she was only 14 years old, and she was Lucy, who is known as "the grandmother of all mankind".
After the birth of human civilization, the average life expectancy of human beings increased, but it was only about 37 years old. During the war years, the average life expectancy was even shorter, only 20 years.
In the 19th century, as the Industrial Revolution began to sprout, the average life expectancy of humans also improved, to about 61 years. Today, the average life expectancy of the world's human population is increasing every year, at a rate of about 1-3 years every 5 years, and is now 77 years, with women living even longer.
So what's going on here?
Stable Energy
When we were an agricultural society, humans relied on growing crops for energy. But one characteristic of traditional crops is that they depend on the weather. In today's Ethiopia, the backwardness of the local economy and poor infrastructure have resulted in the lack of even watering facilities, so that only places near rivers or in more low-lying areas are able to irrigate their farmland, while the rest of the farmland relies heavily on rainfall to alleviate drought.
Because of the randomness of the rainfall, it is not possible to replenish the water for the farmland in time, so the local crop harvest is not stable. The erratic harvests mean that local farmers are vulnerable to hunger, and even in years of low energy levels, starvation breaks out in the region, resulting in a few deaths.
Before the Industrial Revolution, most farmers relied on the weather to feed themselves, and although some countries organized ditch-digging and ditch-raising to ensure that their crops grew as well as they could, there was not enough power to do so, and so every once in a while when there was an energy crisis in the area, people would always die as a result.
After the Industrial Revolution, people not only solved the problem of watering farmland, but also invented chemical fertilizers and pesticides to increase food production. Also, breeders worked hard in the fields to cultivate a variety of high-quality crop seeds.
More importantly, farmers no longer had to rely on the sky for food, and therefore had a more stable source of energy and were less likely to experience major famines.
Improvement of living conditions
In the past, human living areas were not only populated by wild animals, but also by many livestock that pooped and peed on the streets, and even human feces humans were too late to clean up in time.
For example: in the past, people in Paris, France would dump their feces on the street. As we know, there are many microorganisms in feces, including some disease-causing germs, and the contact between these feces and human beings is so close that human beings can easily be infected with these viruses, resulting in illness or death.
Also, in the Middle Ages, many livestock were not kept in specific breeding areas, but roamed the streets. And this invariably spread disease-causing germs.
The sanitation problems led to frequent outbreaks of infectious diseases in medieval Europe, with the Black Death being the most common, a disease that is known to have killed 2/3 of all Europeans.
And the East was no better. Like Europe, the East had no underground water system at the time, so there were frequent outbreaks of plague as well as smallpox, leading to a short life expectancy.
Today, the infrastructure in the vast majority of places, both East and West, in cities and in the countryside, has eliminated the pathways for the spread of disease.
But the close interaction between people today also makes it possible for germs, if spread, to have a serious impact on the world.
Improvements in healthcare
There is nothing that has had a greater impact on human longevity than improvements in healthcare. Thanks to advances in science and technology, we are able to detect illnesses before they even start.
Also, the best way to fight disease is to prevent it, and today we can monitor babies before they are even born to get a simple idea of their physical condition, induce labor for those with serious illnesses, and achieve eugenics.
After birth, babies are immunized with a variety of vaccines, which reduces the infant mortality rate and improves their resistance to germs, inadvertently prolonging the human lifespan.
When we are sick, we can seek the help of doctors, in ancient times many are incurable diseases, nowadays most of them can be solved, for example: tuberculosis. For some of the more lethal diseases, it is now possible to do as much as possible to extend human life, for example: cancer.
It is because of the progress of health care that the life expectancy of human beings has been greatly extended. In the Kangxi era, Kangxi once organized a thousand old man banquet, refers to the banquet will be within the country more than 60 old people, in the era of Kangxi life, 60 years old has been a very long life of the elderly. But nowadays, 60-year-olds are very common, even centenarians are many.