STUDENT: Christian Raoul Toussaint

PROJECT ADVISOR: Dr. Meg Hatch

ABSTRACT:

In this century, the lifespan of humans (Homo sapiens) experienced its biggest increase by going from 47 to about 85 years which is also considered the average today (Leveille et al, 1999). Demography is considered the study of characteristics of human populations like deaths, births and growth rate which survivorship patterns are an important part of (Rauschert, 2010). Human survivorship can change throughout the years due to the impact of natural disasters, wars, and diseases but the biggest impact witnessed is the one after World War II due to advances in medicine. Survivorship can also vary between countries (Rauschert, 2010). There are three types of survivorship curves but here, I focused on type I since humans are the topic here and type I mean that the organism has high survivorship throughout life until old age comes into play. In this study, I compared survivorship between two cities, one in the United States and one in Canada, between two time periods, before and after 1950, and between two sexes. Survivorship can be determined through births and death dates in local cemeteries. I found an increase in survivorship in both sexes after 1950 with comparable rates between the United States and Canada.