age of man

How long does a human being live? The Bible says "threescore years and ten" are the allotted life of man, and that means seventy years, because a score is twenty. The Bible also tells of men who lived nine hundred years or more (and the oldest of them, Methuselah, lived 969 years), but there is no record that men ever lived to ages like that or anything near it at any other time. The average age to which men live has been going up steadily for years, as medical science has developed new ways of treat­ing disease and preventing illness from killing people at early ages.

The aver­age age to which people live in the United States is now 65 years; only forty or fifty years ago it was from 45 to 48 years. That is a decided increase, but it does not mean the oldest people today are any older than were the oldest people of a hundred or five hundred or a thou­sand years ago. The average goes up be­cause fewer people die young. If a baby of a few months dies, and a man of al­most seventy dies, you get the average by adding their ages together and divid­ing by two, so the two of them have died at an average age of 35. Far fewer babies and children and young men and women die now than they used to, and that has sent the average up. A man who lives to be 100 years old or more is just as rare today as he ever was. Women live longer than men. For some reason, their bodies seem better able to resist diseases, and not so many women wear themselves out with worry and overwork as do men in the frantic life of this century.

The average life of women is more than 67 years, and the average age of men is only 63 years, and that is what makes the average age of all human beings, men and women to­gether, 65 years. In most other countries of the world, the average age is not as high as it is in the United States. For example, in India, where there is not enough food to keep everyone healthy and in good condition, and not enough doctors and drugs to keep diseases from spreading, the aver­age age is not much more than half of what it is in the United States—31 years. The low average is partly caused by the fact that so many babies die. Many more mothers die in childbirth too, as they used to in all countries until ways were found to prevent infection.