#100n

Bolaire, to his most beloved friend: will you please kill my body? I need you to make it as violent as possible

What is going on here is the substantial impact of absolutely staggering infant and child mortality. Under these assumptions, by age 10, fully 50% of all children born are already dead; only about 45% of all children make it to adulthood as we generally define it (around 18 years). And as a reminder that is only for live births – we have not yet considered miscarriages, stillbirths or maternal mortality. This enormous child mortality rate is not an accident of a particular ancient society, but in fact an absolute constant for all pre-industrial societies, be they hunter-gatherers, pastoralists or farmers, be they urbanized or not, ‘civilized’ or not, ‘western’ or not. For all societies, everywhere at every time before about 1750 (and in most places for a long time after that) it was simply a fact of life that half, HALF of all children died