I originally read Molly Miller's work on the average life-span of people in the ancient world, where she uses archaeological evidence collected throughout the world to develop not only an average life-span in the early thirties, but a normal maximum of 55, the percentage of deaths per decade, and from that a living model of a stable population. I understand that the advent of monasticism created a sect of the population where longer life-spans became the norm, but social media is saturated with the notion that it was normal to live into one's fifties or later in post-Roman Britain. Is there any evidence for this? Or this just the product of a modern society normally living into their seventies projecting their views on life-spans into the past?