Despite how it may have seemed when you came back from summer vacation to start eighth grade and every boy's voice had changed at once, the age of human adolescence isn't set in stone. A German demographic researcher says that the age of sexual maturity in males has been steadily decreasing since the mid-eighteenth century. And he reached this conclusion based on the rate at which young men get themselves killed.
Human males have an unfortunate tendency to die in early adulthood. Recklessness and violence aren't just traits of young males in the modern era. Even in earlier centuries, when young men had to satisfy their adrenaline cravings with buggy racing, dueling, or hanging around smallpox patients, they were more likely to die than women of the same age.
This leads to a phenomenon called the "accident hump." Both sexes have a relatively high risk of dying as an infant, ...
