Hi Stephen, unfortunately 1 in 8 woman died giving birth prior to the resent times, many more died for a mix of other reasons, many men died as well.

A mind blowing fact is that the average marriage only lasted 10 years until recent times as on average that was how long it took for one partner to die. So, on average the male or female half would die within 10 years of marriage.

Prior to the agricultural revolution these figures would have been higher, even higher still prior to the cognitive revolution.

Death certainly knew how to find our ancestors! A crazy fact is during the Bronze Age, some societies had average life expectancies of 18.5, obviously the poorer ones, but it still shows how different the past was for life expectancy than the present. Crazy to get your head around it, especially that living past 40 as a norm is a recent thing, so last 10,000 years or so!

Hope this makes sense, thanks for the comment!