Dating means different things to different people, and even more so among differing generational groups.
My dad first had sex aged 12 (he was bizarrely proud of it, disturbing as it is that I know this!), and he claims to have had 10 girlfriends by the time he left school at 14 - granted, this *was* around 1970. Whereas for my generation (I'm mid-30s), most of the people I know started dating less physically when they were 12-13, and the physical stuff came later. That said, the average age of a girl's first time in my country has been 17 for decades. So maybe things don't always change that much. Maybe it's more about how we see them.
That what I was getting at with one of my comments. Mostly because I was talking to a co-worker about it. Things seem normal because thats how we grew up. If someone grew up in an age where people were having sex younger and they were use to it, then it would seem strange. We grew up in an era where normal AoC to have sex with everyone was 18. Though there are exceptions. So, its just normal to us to be older, I guess...
AoC hasn't been 18 in a lot of places for a long time. In Britain it's 16, has been so for decades, and it's only a handful of years since parts of the US had it set at 12 or 14. ---