The fallacy many people tend to fall into is forgetting that while you are quite likely to die at childbirth or early years unless you were extremely privileged you would also be almost as likely to die even when older when every day of your life was a struggle.
Sure the elites that lived lives of relative luxury could live almost as long if they didn't require medical intervention but the plebs? pffttt any accident could be fatal without modern medicine and working hard laboring life without any support structure simply didn't allow people to live that long which caused essentially a pretty big discrepancy in early history and classical times between the life expectancy of the lower and upper classes much more than what we see today.
As mentioned in that entry "The following information is derived from the 1961 Encyclopædia Britannica and other sources, some with questionable accuracy." Like somebody else has mentioned, older life expectancy figures are pretty bad because it's difficult to pin down the exact age of mortality for skeletons beyond a certain point. And then there is also the question as to whether or not we're discovering representative samples.
The statement above suggests not that Britannica has questionable accuracy, but the 'other sources'. Though I'd expect Britannica is also flawed. This is a problem that's somewhat inherent to the issue. Our knowledge of prehistoric life expectancies is based on extremely flimsy science.
In particular the dating of age for ancient skeletons usually comes down to some correlation to tooth and bone growth. You look at their teeth/bone development and approximate the age based on how long it takes modern samples, that we know the age of, to reach a comparable level of development. But at a certain age these all sort to converge to becoming identical meaning we can't really tell the difference between e.g. 50 years old and 80 years old.
And, as mentioned, there's also the issue of representation. Are the measurable samples we have recovered a representative sample or is their some bias or other issue that might be getting in the way? And there's even the problem of assuming identical growth patterns. Did different diets, lifestyles, and even evolutionary changes affect development? Maybe, but we're optimistically hoping the answer is no. All in all the science behind these numbers is just really not all that great, even if it's the best we can do for now.
We can’t tell the difference between 50-60 and 80 well sorta but the problem is that we don’t even find skeletons of 50 year olds, at least in the digs in Israel and Turkey, iirc the oldest skeleton in the Hayonim cave in Israel was around 40 years old so they either didn’t bury their elders or their elders were in their 30s.
I'm not familiar with the specifics of HaYonim Cave, but in general I do think a major issue is that what people do with their corpses is ritualized and often class/role centric. So what exactly did they do with their dead? Who knows. And that's really the problem. These measurements all come down to make some fairly substantial, and unprovable, assumptions. And there are the other issues you also are not considering, and are generally not considered. There are a practically infinite number of reasons that developmental correlations between contemporary humans and groups 10,000+ years in the past might no longer hold. Yet we have to assume that they do. Again, it's another fairly substantial, yet unprovable, assumption.
And in general that's the problem. We have to make a whole lot of optimistic assumptions, but if even one is off then everything is completely thrown off. This is the reason I tend to take pre-historic anthropology with a grain of salt. For that matter even post-historic anthropology tends to often be full of questionable science. For instance one big piece of news was the discovery that a piece of Viking burial cloth, in Sweden, contained Arabic script and references to Allah. The problem is that it was later discovered that the script it was allegedly written in had not yet been invented at the time of the corpse's burial. That such a 'discovery' was not the first thing that was checked before racing to publish seems to be an unfortunately common occurrence in these sort of sciences. It goes without saying that you should try to disprove your hypothesis, not prove it. Only then when you've completely failed to refute your hypothesis should you begin to considering the possibility of its correctness, given available information.
>Based on Early Neolithic data, total life expectancy at 15 would be 28–33 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy we have a lot of skeletons.
The fallacy many people tend to fall into is forgetting that while you are quite likely to die at childbirth or early years unless you were extremely privileged you would also be almost as likely to die even when older when every day of your life was a struggle.
Sure the elites that lived lives of relative luxury could live almost as long if they didn't require medical intervention but the plebs? pffttt any accident could be fatal without modern medicine and working hard laboring life without any support structure simply didn't allow people to live that long which caused essentially a pretty big discrepancy in early history and classical times between the life expectancy of the lower and upper classes much more than what we see today.