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But we are living longer now. 35 years old is basically dead.
The babies died making average age less. Doesn't mean those who got to adulthood lived to that age only.
Yeah. If you made it past 10 or so you'd probably live to at least 50, with 60-70 not being common but also far from rare. All those dying kids and babies really bring down the average.
Let's not get too crazy. There's a 15 year period where young men tend to get injured and young women tend to give birth that acts as a major filter. If you plotted death rates on a graph it would look like a trident -- that's life without antibiotics.
It's certainly true that elderly were not a rare sight, but those elderly who could be found were almost universally hardy of constitution or talented at avoiding danger. Quite literally the end of the bell curve.
Family having like 13 kids, only 5 maybe making it to teen age, daughter dies in childbirth, 4 kids to 50 type beat.
Population graph after penicillin is very telling