The first human lived 930 years.

Some progress we're making today!

[Posted by: daniel at July 8, 2004 5:32 AM]

Back to reality. This is interesting, but I would like to see statisticl on the longevity spans of all the great apes. Chimps frequently live to be grandparents, and use more tools than the other apes. Just a thought.

[Posted by: Oligonicella at July 8, 2004 5:45 AM]

In college remember reading about hunter gatherer tribes in what is now Namibia. Quite a few actually make it into their 50's and 60's. Do not take an AVERAGE age of 30 to mean people were keeling over at 30 and 1/2 years. In the hunter gatherer society we read about in class a lot of infants died--due to disease and genetic problems, and a lot of teenagers died due to disease (in many case seemingly genetic) and accident (teenagers -- go figure). That of course brought down the average age, but the people who were left were very healthy.

Hunter gatherer societies often had better diets than the agrarian populations later on. At least when I was in college (10 years ago!) there were articles on how after a community "settled down" the average height would drop several inches! Also, plagues did not effect nomadic peoples as much...if people were parked in an area and a disease set in they picked up and moved. Obviously this wouldn't work for all diseases, but it would nip an epidemic like cholera in the bud.

[Posted by: Carolynn at July 8, 2004 6:03 AM]

Re: Bible thumper up there: The Bible is fiction, anaology and folk tales, buddy. Get over it.

Many people misunderstand life expectancy, somehow imagining that LE of 30 means 30 year olds are decrepit. No, it means you most likely have a massive number of infants dying before their first year.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, LE was in the mid 40's. Many people lived to their 80's. It was the infant mortality that was the factor.
The real trick to defeating aging would be an increase beyond 80 years.
We seem to built for around 70 years or so (still longer than most animals our size), normal wear and tear.
We also need to make those extra years worth it. What is the point to living to 100 if you remember nothing of the first 99 or if your life consists of sitting and staring out a window.
The increase in life span 32000 years ago was more likely a drop in infant mortality. That means more people making it to breeding age, which means more people, which means both a more complex society but also an urge to expand to deal with the population pressure and a greater likelihood of new ideas (and even exceptional individuals)
More people equals more ideas. That point in time may have been the critical point where we passed beyond mere maintenance and had enough people to afford to be clever.

[Posted by: GW Crawford at July 8, 2004 6:15 AM]

Carolynn is absolutely right. Infant mortality rates were high into the late 19th century, but people who made it out of childhood could look forward to 60 or so years of life, at least. Even in western Europe in the Middle Ages, where two-thirds of all children died before age 10, people living to 90 or 100 was not unheard of.

[Posted by: Brian at July 8, 2004 6:50 AM]

But life expectancy is irrelevant here. The article explains that the researchers arrived at their conclusion by estimating the ages at death of ancient remains. Five times more 30-year-old-plus remains were found beginning at 30,000 years ago. This indicates that indeed people suddenly started living longer, not that fewer died in infancy. The big question is why.

[Posted by: Munango-Keewati at July 8, 2004 10:44 AM]

The usefulness of older folks to society depends on two items: One is their ability to continue to be productive. Hunting and gathering is a tough business and the accumulation of dings could mean becoming less useful by around thirty. Maybe not. But look at professional athletes in the contact sports, even as they are attended by the best physicians and trainers. Maybe it was a matter of technology (arrows and spearthrowers) which allowed killing from a distance. Did that technology show up about 33000 years ago?
The other benefit is that the older folks have experience that can be passed on to the younger folks. That requires the younger folks paid attention to the older ones. Does that sound reasonable?
How much history is repeated because "it's different this time, and besides, we just want to."?
I go with the technology change.

[Posted by: Richard Aubrey at July 8, 2004 11:05 AM]

Uhh, a five fold increase which left lifespan at 30 years means that the previous value of lifespan was 6 years. Other things being equal, that would mean that hardly anyone reached puberty. With typical high infant mortality and the normal two year spacing between unprotected births, a population with these characteristics would vanish in a few years.
Assuming that the original researchers surely had some degree of numeracy and that most journalists are highly innumerate, it is likely that some slippage occurred in this story.

[Posted by: Gerald S. Wasserman at July 9, 2004 5:54 AM]