What was the lifespan of the prehistoric man?

Question

(please specify)

Australopithicine

Homo Habilis

Homo Erectus

Neanderthal

Cro-Magnon

How long did they live!?

Answer 1

What these short life spans mean is that the majority of the population were in their teens and preteens. This means that civilization was developed by teenagers. The form of these civilizations were influenced by the mental ability of their founders. For this look at the mental developmental stages described by Freud, Erickson, Piaget, particularly Kohlberg's stages of moral development.

Answer 2

Bravo Zulu is certainly correct.  I suspect that Australopithecines and Homo Habilis matured much faster and had lifespans of maybe 30 years (wild guess).  H. erectus probably 35 and Neanderthals and CroMagnon probably were old at 40 plus.

Answer 3

We don' have the information needed to estimate the lifespan of Astralopithicus, or Hablis.  However Erectus probably aged slightly more quickly than did Cro-Magnon (really just Homo Sapien Sapien) found in that cave in France.  This has been established by teeth in the fossiles.

Now if one talks about "life expectancy"  that is a different matter due to the hazards of the hunter/gathering culture.  One could expect to encounter predatory animals & large prey animals that resisted attempts to kill them & instead killed the predator humans.

Neandertals & Ancient homo sapiens over the age of 60 have been discovered on a number of occasions... so they appear to have been capable of living to about age 70... but not likely to do so.

Answer 4

I have heard the estimate that 45 or 50 years old seems to be very old for most ancient men.  I suppose that is based on estimating ages when they died but they have so few fossils, I doubt that could be very reliable.

Answer 5

Interesting question and one about which I have wondered.  The best I could find was that a 35 year old male in biblical times was ancient. Life had to hard by our standards today.

We find supposedly very old individuals written about in the old testament but these unrealistic ages were made up by one of the four authors which redacted the original Book of “J”, over the centuries, and believing the original book to an actual account of history wanted to establish a lineage between Adam and Eve and individuals in the story between Adam and Eve and the great flood of the bible when god supposedly killed everybody on earth save Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives.

This was a difficult process and requires ages much longer than humanly possible. For example, Noah was made to live almost 1000 years to make the lineage work. It made for some fantastic ages. lol

The four authors scholars refer to, other that the original author “J” for Jahwist, write about  the authors

E, D, P, and finally sometime in the second century CE, the author of the Pentateuch, the author R for the great Redactor.

There is much controversy but no new postulation has been put forward. Good luck with your research. So, the 7,8 and 9 hundred old people in the bible are fantasy.

Survival in ancient times before, civilization and for a long while afterwards, had to be very difficult and a 30 year old must have been a very old member of a tribe.

Jim D

Answer 6

It is estimated to be about 18 years.

Answer 7

Australopithicine about 4.0 to 1.0 million years ago,Homo Habilis the oldest recognized species in the genus Homo known only from East Africa from about 2.0 million years ago,Homo Erectus 1.5 million,Neanderthal western Asia from about 200,000 to 28,000 years ago,Cro-Magnon about 40,000 to 10,000 years ago