Rude Paleo hunters quite often did survive,
For forty years (the women ten years younger),
If, at age fifteen, they were alive,
The stone-age farmers, thirty years — not longer.
In classic Greece the playwrights lived past sixty
Once childhood passed, the age was oft four-score
Greek towns had toilets, sewers sanitary,
The slaves cleaned all the filth and gore.
Old age in Rome was fifty years, no more,
As cooking pots and pipes were made of lead.
From age fourteen the girls their children bore,
One-half the born by age fifteen were dead.
In school, the wars of Greece and Rome we study,
We do not learn protagonists were thirty.