Because we are humans ourselves, there are many traits that we all have and that we tend to take for granted. Of course, the most convenient is a year. This is also likely to be the most convenient unit of time for study of deer or elephants. This issue will have to be decided once the data are in hand. Additional phenomena that might influence our data for human life tables are social characteristics.
Humans die from other causes than starvation, malnutrition, and old age.
Wars result in considerable human mortality, but usually the males suffer greater war-related mortality than females. Human medical care has exhibited a social evolution that has resulted in greater longevity for individuals of both sexes, with the greatest advances coming fairly recently. Finally, it is well known that the human population of the United States has grown dramatically in the last two or three hundred years. But the population of Auburn, Alabama, from which our cemetery samples were taken, has shown more gradual increases over the last one hundred years and may even have gone through some periods of decrease. There are a variety of questions that we might examine with life table data.