before modern medicine, how did medieval people live to their 80s? How did they survive common conditions that could result in death like open wound infection, tooth infection, diseases, unhygienic food and water?
In: Biology
Let’s say you have a class of 20 people take a quiz.
Let’s say 10 of them get a middle score of 50% right, 5 of them get less than that with 40% right, and the other 5 get more than that with 60% right. In this case it would be correct to say the average score of the class is 50%.
But what if only 2 people got 50% right, while 8 people did really badly with 10% right and the other 8 did really well and got 90% right. In this case it would ALSO be correct to say the average score of the class is 50%.
But those two scenarios look totally different. In the first one, if you hear the average is 50%, and so you picture a typical student getting about 50%, your imagination would be right. But in the second, if you do the same thing an imagine a typical student getting about 50% right, your imagination would be totally off. In the second example the only reason the average is 50% is because lots of people are getting way less than 50% while other people are getting way more than 50%, moving the average to a point in between the people with really bad scores and the people with really good scores even though hardly anyone actually got that average score.
This is kind of what is happening when you hear people cite average life expectancy for midieval populations. If you hear a figure like “31.3 years old” that’s not because it was typical for lots of people to die at 31 years old. It’s because lots of people died young as children while other people lived to old age, and the average lands in between these two sets of people.
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