Jingszo !

Picture a stereotypical scene in a medieval village. What do you imagine? Children playing in the dirty unpaved street perhaps, maybe two men on top of a cottage fixing the thatch, perhaps a young woman sweeping the front step, worrying about her elderly 35-year-old mother who is dying in the back room… of old age.

What’s wrong with this picture?

According to many articles discussing popular misconceptions about history, there’s a pervasive myth that people died of old age in their mid 30s, and that ancient Greeks or Romans “would have been flabbergasted to see anyone above the age of 50 or 60.”