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Notes -
This is an often cited fact, but it hides more than it shows. Historically women had lower life expectancy compared to men thanks to horrible death rate during child birth. Yes, they may have managed to reproduce - but so what. It was their family, mostly males who took care of now motherless children. Without men these children would not survive.
This is afaik in artifact of excluding violent deaths in the statistics, not the reality on the ground. Obviously it is silly to exclude violent deaths but include childbirth if you want to understand the differences in life expectancy between men and women, yet it is all to common. See for example this letter in the journal of the royal society of medicine.
In many known societies, males had far higher violent deaths rates, to such a degree that adult women would frequently outnumber adult men. For a particularly extreme example see the paraguyan triple war, at the end of which women outnumbered men 10:1. Only in long peace times you would have higher life expectancy for men. This also isn't just due to large-scale wars with modern weapons in the more developed societies; hunter gatherers often have even higher violent deaths rates "just" due to skirmishes.
Obviously we do not really have reliable data of actual life expectancy for most of history, but I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the ancestor statistic is a simple result of enough men dying a violent death sufficiently early so that the 2:1 is simply the gender ratio in the adult population.
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