Remember that for most of our hundred-thousand-year existence—all but the past couple of hundred years—the average life span of human beings has been thirty years or less. (Research suggests that subjects of the Roman Empire had an average life expectancy of twenty-eight years.) The natural course was to die before old age. Indeed, for most of history, death was a risk at every age of life and had no obvious connection with aging, at all. As Montaigne wrote, observing late-sixteenth-century life, “To die of age is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death, and so much less natural than others:
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