Apparently the average prehistoric man that made it into adulthood lived longer than you have so far, Matt.

Depraved penguin sex antics shocked expert [link]

Reasons to love the internet: Just watching the great NPH parts of the Tonys without seeing awards for shows I won't see.

Apparently the average prehistoric man that made it into adulthood lived longer than you have so far, Matt.

It was really interesting to me to realize that if "average lifespan" was 50 (a made-up number), that didn't mean that 50-year-olds were elderly, just that a lot of people died at 20 or whatever.

Or in infancy. Life expectancy at age 5 is a figure you'll often see that gives you a much clearer picture of reality. Especially for anything pre-20th century.

Brenda's right - making it to 5 is huge. Aside from the obvious issues with disease and accidents in a world without antibiotics, the other big killer of otherwise healthy people in pre-modern societies was childbirth. A woman who made it to 45 had a pretty good chance of 80.

Tangentially, I decided to try eating 100g of dark chocolate a day as recommended by some study or other (as seen by me on the Good Stuff tumbler, I don't know the source beyond that) and I'm finding that that is kind of a lot of chocolate. A pound and half a week!

Paging billytea: I could have sword I read that sea cucumbers ate by vomiting their stomachs onto the food, digesting it externally, and putting their bits back in. But wikipedia does not back me up on this. Is there another sea creature that eats this way?

There is, for instance starfish. And as a wise man once said, "Starfish have no brain, and they don't even know it."

Or in infancy. Life expectancy at age 5 is a figure you'll often see that gives you a much clearer picture of reality. Especially for anything pre-20th century.

Oh, absolutely.

The tales of the Middle Ages are full of people in their 60s or older, mostly men, given the hazards of childbirth. They also weren't that short, because the heights were being measured from surviving armor, which was mostly fancy presentation stuff given to a nobleman in his youth. He grew out of it, and it was put on display. The armor from his adulthood generally wore out or was reworked into new suits. Most of what survived from general utility armor was melted down for later wars. The fancy stuff survived.

Related to discussion of diets, a category on the $25,000 Pyramid I'm watching was "fattening foods," and the list was: jam, potato, soda, sausage, hollandaise, eclair, caramel. Potato?? We must have been a few years out from the baked-potato-with-yogurt diet craze.