Historically, though, as our living conditions improved, this number has improved. In the Neolithic period, life was a nasty, brutish, and short twenty years. This jumped to twenty-six in the Bronze and Iron Ages; and up to twenty-eight in ancient Greece and Rome, making Socrates a seventy-year-old anomaly when he died in 399 BCE. By the early Middle Ages, we pushed into the forties, but our ascendancy was still limited by appallingly high infant mortality rates. During the early sixteen hundreds in England, two-thirds of all children died before the age of four, and the resulting life
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