I’ve just (re) watched Kurosawa’s Dreams – quite breathtaking imagery, no doubts. Towards the end of the film, there is a part about “Watermill Village”, where people lead “natural way of life” and live till age 100. This notion is quite peculiar, whereas it is a historical fact that the more “natural” way people lived, the shorter their life span was: in the medieval ages people’s average life expectancy was ~30 years (see this wikipedia article, for example). So, what’s up here?