I don't believe your number. Citation required. And I'm serious about that. I'm sure it's possible to get that number somehow, but the devil is in the details.
Do you factor in:
- Famines?
- Wars?
- Being killed by bandits?
- Are you talking about the city of Rome? Italy? Gaul?
- Just rich people, or do you include folks like slaves?
- Etc.
If you're going to accuse me of giving bad information, you'll need to provide better information. And from there, you need to count on dubious records. I took my number from Crash Course history (the unit on the middle ages), but it meets what I'd previously read across multiple credible sources.
"We have a single papyrus record of 122 individuals listed in a register of taxes. Of these 122, 85 have ages extant. ... only 8 are over the age of 49 years, and only 2 of those are over 54"
"average life expectance at age 15 range from 8.3 to 15.4 years."
Etc. There's a broad set of estimates, but the estimate of 50 years is simply not plausible, unless you're talking about the wealthy elite. Being poor in Rome sucked.
And with Rome, I guess that's usually the case.
I'll mention: For all the talk of infant mortality, most infant deaths in history weren't recorded. The figure everyone tosses around -- 28 years -- sort of already takes that into account.
I've given up on editing bad Wikipedia pages a long time ago.
There was a random process. Plenty of people lived to be 90, and plenty of people died at birth.
The difference was that a random cut could turn into an infection and kill you. Hannibal lost vision in one eye due to an infection. Prior to antibiotics, you never knew if an infection would:
- Pass;
- Disable you; or
- Kill you
Same thing for a lot of other medical issues, as well as non-medical ones (such as a famine, bandits, or a random army passing through).
People in Roman empire lived until 90 just like us. For example Seneca de Elder was 92 when he died.
The reason why "life expectance" was 30 years was because child deaths, since that number is just an average.
If you have 2 people living in a country, one is 100, and the other is 0, and the child dies, life expectancy is 50.