I don’t believe life expectancy has changed all that much.
I’ve tracked my ancestry back to the mid 1600s and find a lot of people living well into their 80s. Men tended to live longer but I attribute that to the fact that they weren’t pregnant 15 or 16 times. Lots of children died but if you were a male who survived to adulthood, chances are that you would live as long as anyone today.
I’ve tracked my ancestry back to the mid 1600s and find a lot of people living well into their 80s. Men tended to live longer but I attribute that to the fact that they weren’t pregnant 15 or 16 times. Lots of children died but if you were a male who survived to adulthood, chances are that you would live as long as anyone today.
If you want to go back to the 1600s, life expectancy then would probably be about 35 years. (It has been rising pretty much since then, especially with steady advancements in sanitation and medicine since the latter nineteenth century.) But remember, that's only a statistical mean. Your ancestors who lived into their eighties probably had exceptional DNA to enable them to ward off the multiple medical problems that killed their peers at younger ages back then, but the fact that some folks lived long lives then is well known. Take Louis XIV of France as an example.
Yes, infant and child mortality were much more common back then statistically. But even among those who survived to adulthood, life expectancy was significantly lower in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, and even most of the 1900s than it is today.
I think you got the male vs. female life expectancy right. In those days of yore, a much larger percentage of relatively young women died due to complications from pregnancy and child birth, which overall gave males a longer life expectancy. This trend was exacerbated by the large average number of pregnancies. But with great and steady advances in obstetrics, especially since 1900 or so, female deaths due to pregnancy and child birth are today very rare, which flipped life expectancy in favor of women. The last numbers I recall give women a life expectancy of approximately six years greater than men in developed countries.