Eat Shit and _Die_, Fundies! Regular Sex Ed Works!!

[Adrian Laguna]

High childhood mortality would tend to actually make puberty take longer to start. Puberty is energy intensive thus it should begin at a time when the body is strong enough to deal with it and any threats to itself at the same time.

Everything I said after what I quoted just now might be bullshit, it just occurred to me that I may be confounding variables. After all, how the hell is the human organism supposed to know what the local mortality rate is? Yet the fact remains that in earlier times the onset of puberty tended to be later than in modern times, and more so along the lower classes than the upper classes. The difference is probably nutricion. Modern nutricion means that humans are capable of dealing with puberty at the earlierst possible moment, whereas the poorer nutricion of people in primitive societies meant they had to wait longer.

[Johonebesus]

In a "state of nature" primitive humans routinely lived into their fifties and beyond. In fact, lifespans actually decreased with the advent of agriculture. Hunting and gathering is less stressful on the body than the daily labor involved in farming. Also, you should be very careful about dealing with averages that don't allow for infant and childhood mortality. If you average in every live birth, the average lifespan might be twenty, but anyone who survived childhood could reasonably expect to see fifty.

Precisely why should infant and childhood mortality be excluded? Do you think it's somehow "unfair" to characterize primitive living by one of its biggest problems? And what's your source for child-bearing women routinely living into their fifties (you're responding to a post about child-bearing women, after all) in prehistoric times when childbirth carried a very high risk of mortality before the development of modern medicine?

The poster I was responding to said that teenage girls could expect to die before twenty-five, so it made sense for them to reproduce as early as possible. He seems to be buying into the myth that the short average lifespan in past times meant that thirty was elderly and rare, but this is a misunderstanding of statistics. What people forget is that such averages include all live births. If someone was lucky enough to survive to reproductive age, he could reasonably expect to live into his late forties or early fifties. I never said that "it's somehow 'unfair' to characterize primitive living by one of its biggest problems". My point was that this unfortunate reality should be taken into account when figuring "average lifespans", and so Pezook is wrong that a teenage girl couldn't expect to live past twenty-five. If she could manage to survive long enough to start menstruating, then there as a good chance she would experience menopause. I've read a lot of articles questioning the evolutionary advantage of grandmothers.

My source is numerous texts and articles I have read discussing ancient life. I thought it was pretty well established that life expectancy actually decreased with the advent of agriculture, and that female longevity, even with multiple pregnancies, was a question that biologists and anthropologists have been studying for some time.

[PeZook]

The poster I was responding to said that teenage girls could expect to die before twenty-five, so it made sense for them to reproduce as early as possible. He seems to be buying into the myth that the short average lifespan in past times meant that thirty was elderly and rare, but this is a misunderstanding of statistics. What people forget is that such averages include all live births.

I've probably overstated the harshness of living in a pre-historic hunter-gatherer community, but take note that breeding instincts were well-established way before human society moved out of simplistic pack behavior into tribal territory. You're right about puberty setting on earlier today, sure - but if sufficient food was available, breeding as soon as possible was conductive to survival of the group. Hence, teenagers being horny today, because our instintcs scream "QUICK! There's enough food right now! Breed ASAP, because in a year we may have a famine!!!"