I’m not asking this from a biology lens, I get that aspect, but more from the sociology/anthropology lens. My question is which culture started using 18 as this hard cutoff, when, and under what reasoning.
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In the US, we asked 18 yo’s to go to war, kill others, and to potentially get killed themselves. But we didn’t even let those poor bastards vote for the assholes that sent them to war, or could have potentially voted against it.
There’s a long lead up to this, we used to let 16 year olds go to war back in the 19th century, then 17 with your parent’s permission. We used to marry off 13 and 14 year old girls. That was never the standard but it wasn’t unheard of either. We used to put to death 14 year olds accused of murder. 18 is actually a little older than what we considered an adult historically. But from the US’s founding, 21 was always the age the vote until after the Vietnam war.
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