The fact that the average life expectancy ten thousand years ago was so much shorter than it is now is often (i) ________ as evidence supporting the notion that the world always improves with time. However, if you (ii) _________ for the fact that most children in that epoch died in childbirth, it turns out that life expectancy back then was nearly the same as it is now. On a (iii) _________ note, it also turns out that many “barbaric” huntergatherer tribes were taller on average than the average person now living.
You can start with the first blank here, where a fact about life expectancy relates to the world improving with time. Clearly this would be true if life expectancies have increased with time, so you can simply use cited in the first blank. The second blank, however, says that this statistic is slightly misleading if you consider a new fact (i.e., that most children died in childbirth). This means you need to correct for the new piece of information. The final sentence seems a bit off-topic (suddenly you’re talking about height, when you had been talking about life expectancy), so you should use the word tangential to set it off. Note that sidereal doesn’t have anything to do with being “on the side” — it means “related to the stars.”
