Life Expectancy

clipped from www.cnn.com Neanderthals, on average, lived only 20 years, according to evolutionary anthropologists, and historians estimate the average life expectancy in Europe was still around 30 at the beginning of the 19th century. Even at the turn of the 20th century, life expectancy in the United States was 47, an average dragged down by a large infant and child mortality rate, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Thanks to antibiotics and public health measures such as clean drinking water, most American children now reach adulthood, and the U.S. life expectancy is close to 80, according to the National Institute on Aging. Despite advances in science and medicine, only 1 in 170 people born in the United States a century ago has reached 100, mostly women, and no one on record has lived longer than Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, whose life spanned 122 years before her death in 1997, according to the NIA.