Human Lifespan / Longevity: Historical; Attainable; Theoretical

[many_angled_one]

RE: If modern humans emerged 100,000 years ago, why didn't civilization appear until only about 10,000 years ago?

The average lifespan of a human was into the late twenties way back when.

 

[intaglio]

The average lifespan of a human was into the late twenties way back when. So talking about remaning able to have children for 20+ years is a no go I'm afraid.

The average lifespan was 20? what evidence. I've heard of several early modern skeletons displaying signs of arthritic chance and the modern equivalents of stone-age people hav lifespans well into the 40's.

 

[many_angled_one]

I said AVERAGE lifespan and I said it was late twenties. I know fine well there were people living into their forties etc back then.

It's fairly well established that the twenties was the average lifespan in that period. I mean the average lifespan in the roman period was about 30 so it's not hard to believe that it was less that long ago. Most people died from illness, starvation or injury way before middle age.

one source of information: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Human, Neanderthal 20
Human, Neolithic 20
Human, Classical Greece 28
Human, Classical Rome 28
Human, Medieval England 33**
Human, end of 18th Century 37
Human, early 20th Century 50
Human, circa 1940 65
Human, current 77-79 (varies by region)

Although I believe that the average lifespans have been revisted slighlty upwards since that data was written, for the neolithic anyway.

 

[FelixAntonius]

Don't forget that the "average lifespan" includes infant deaths, which were rampant before the 20th Century, (& still are in the third world).

The major reason why average lifespans have increased in the West is because of this decrease in infant deaths.

If you remove the infant death factor, people who survived childhood, tended to live at least as long as many people today...

That is, plague, famine or falling mammoths permitting!!!!

 

[intaglio]

Even a brief Google search shows wide variation in estimates of "average" age and none of them state whether mean, mode or median! One quoted average for neolith men as 33 and women as 28. I think someone somewhere is going to have to do a proper study in the light of modern understanding.

NB I'd be very wary about EB and similar publications in supplying data. They tend to use old established sources rather than cutting edge reseach.

I'll try and post some questions elsewhere on this question.

 

[naitaka]

An average lifespan in the twenties doesn't mean that no one made it past 30. As this page* explains:

"Keep in mind that life-expectancy-at-birth is a mean, not a median; high infant mortality conceals the substantial number of people who will live well past this age."

Life expectancy for a Roman woman at birth was 25, but if she survived to age 10, it was 51, and 2.2 per cent of the populace was over 70.

* Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:

Roman Life Expectancy
https://web.archive.org/web/20020209015748/https://www.utexas.edu/depts/classics/documents/Life.html

 

[sciotofloods]

Don't know if this bothers anyone else, but I've always been annoyed by this phrase often used in popular science writing or television documentaries to describe ancient peoples.

Usually in relation to the discovery of a ancient burial of some man in his 30's or 40's they will always add some aside that being 35 years old 4000 years ago made you an "old man."

Of course, high infant mortality combined with the many diseases and traumas that could kill a person in ancient times made for a low average life expectancy. But, I can't imagine any society where a 35 year old man would have been considered "old." A person's mid-30's always have been, and probably always will be the prime of a person's life.

Even ancient medical texts, such as "The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine" from China describe the age of 36 to be the prime of a man's life, when he is at his peak mentally and physically. It also makes it clear that humans have always reached puberty around the ages of 12-14, that the normal life span of a human (even 2000-3000 years ago) was 65-70 years, and that any death before age 60 was considered pre-mature.

Studies of contemporary primitive cultures also show that, if they avoid infectious diseases or accidents, people are active and vital well into their 60's. Probably even more so than modern "senior citizens."

I get that the "old man for his time" phrase is meant to convey that life expectancy was much lower in ancient times and people had a much lower chance of making it into their 50's or 60's. But it is such a misleading phrase that somehow implies that the aging process of contemporary humans is fundamentally different than ancient people.

 

[James_H]

I think, certainly with neolithic burials, that they often don't find skeletons beyond a certain age (maybe in the 50s), and those of that age show signs of illness that we associate with old age.

 

[Cochise]

It's an example of misuse of statistics. Because the average age was younger people assume that the survivors showed signs of age earlier. They did not, assuming they were fortunate enough to escape the many ways of dying or being injured or acquiring various debilitating diseases.

Similarly today, everyone has a much better chance of living out a normal life than even a century ago, but we still actually age at more or less the same rate, even though the average age of the population has probably risen 50% in that time. Which, incidentally, makes a nonsense of raising the pension age - or at least, of the commonly used justification for it.

 

[CarlosTheDJ]

Looks like next year will be a good one for me then

 

[escargot]

Saying that someone was 'old for their time' suggests to me a sense that they were relatively old, in relation to their peers. They weren't 'old' in any sense except years - they hadn't gone stooped or white-haired.

 

[Anome]

It's an example of misuse of statistics. Because the average age was younger people assume that the survivors showed signs of age earlier. They did not, assuming they were fortunate enough to escape the many ways of dying or being injured or acquiring various debilitating diseases.

I had this argument with someone once, an otherwise seemingly intelligent woman, who was convinced that a woman in her 40s or 50s in the first century AD would be crippled by arthritis and other symptoms of old age, because it was "old for the time".

I tried to explain that this wouldn't be the case, but she was having none of it.

(The discussion was about whether Joseph of Arimathea and the BVM could have travelled to England after the crucifixion. Her claim was that Mary would have been too old to travel.)

 

[stu neville]

We touched on this in another thread a while ago. Being lazy, this is what I wrote then (and have no reason to alter any of it..)

I remember seeing a documentary some years ago, in which a geneticist stated that humans in a completely natural state would be roughly analogous to the other great apes in life expectancy, ie about 45-50. However, that's without clothing or fire, but with very simple tools, Once you factor in artificial warmth, agriculture, lack of predators etc it goes up considerably, as does the natural birth rate.

IIRC the average life expectancy actually went down significantly for a while post-Industrial revolution. Artificially large numbers of people living in much more densely crowded conditions, poor nutrition and sudden large amounts of uncontrolled pollution. And, as Quake pointed out, the already high infant mortality rate went through the roof.

In many cases Medieval serfs had a longer, and better quality of life than workhouse dwellers. Progress, eh?

 

[Mythopoeika]

People living in ancient times would have certainly aged faster than we do today, because of lifestyle. They would have done a lot of hard manual labour and been out in all weathers, and fought hand-to-hand in many fights or battles. Poor nutrition, medicine, sanitation and lack of heating in houses would have also added to the problems.
A 50 year old man in those days would have looked years older than a 50 year old of today.

 

[ramonmercado]

It's an example of misuse of statistics. Because the average age was younger people assume that the survivors showed signs of age earlier. They did not, assuming they were fortunate enough to escape the many ways of dying or being injured or acquiring various debilitating diseases.

I had this argument with someone once, an otherwise seemingly intelligent woman, who was convinced that a woman in her 40s or 50s in the first century AD would be crippled by arthritis and other symptoms of old age, because it was "old for the time".

I tried to explain that this wouldn't be the case, but she was having none of it.

(The discussion was about whether Joseph of Arimathea and the BVM could have travelled to England after the crucifixion. Her claim was that Mary would have been too old to travel.)

I hope you taped the conversation. Why couldn't Mary or Joseph perform a few miracles to get to Blighty?

 

[sciotofloods]

People living in ancient times would have certainly aged faster than we do today, because of lifestyle. They would have done a lot of hard manual labour and been out in all weathers, and fought hand-to-hand in many fights or battles. Poor nutrition, medicine, sanitation and lack of heating in houses would have also added to the problems.
A 50 year old man in those days would have looked years older than a 50 year old of today.

Yes, but this is more a factor of the climate, lifestyle, and probably social class that this person lived in. I know many people today who have lived hard lives and/or not taken good care of themselves and look much older than others their same age.

But how healthy a specific individual is, or how old they appear, doesn't really have anything to do with the general species lifespan.

Also, age 50 wasn't really the age span I was referring to. Often I hear of ancient peoples in their 30's or even 20's being referred to as old.

 

[Quake42]

The Biblical concept of a human life being "three score years and ten" suggests that 70 was indeed considered to be a proper lifespan, even several thousand years ago.

There is certainly no evidence at all that people in their 30s and 40s were considered "old" in past societies, and there are many historical examples of people living active lives well into their 60s and 70s. I expect you saw considerably fewer truly ancient people of 85+ simply because the healthcare which would have enabled them to keep going didn't exist. As Cochise says, a huge amount of comment on this subject seems to be based on a misunderstanding of statistics, in particular those around infant mortality.

 

[Mythopoeika]

I was talking about the majority of people - the peasants.

 

[EnolaGaia]

Meanwhile, it seems another round of debate over the ultimate possible lifespan is getting underway ...

Is There a Limit to the Human Life Span?

There may be no limit to how long humans can live, or at least no limit that anyone has found yet, contrary to a suggestion some scientists made last year, five new studies suggest.

In April, Emma Morano, the oldest known human in the world at the time, passed away at the age of 117. Supercentenarians — people older than 110 — such as Morano and Jeanne Calment of France, who died at the record-setting age of 122 in 1997, have led scientists to wonder just how long humans can live. They refer to this concept as maximum life span.

In a study published in October in the journal Nature, Jan Vijg, a molecular geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and his colleagues concluded that humans may have reached their maximum life span. They analyzed multiple databases containing data on how long people have lived in recent decades in many countries and found that survival rates among the oldest people in most countries had not changed since about 1980. They argued that the human maximum reported age at death had apparently generally plateaued at about 115. [Extending Life: 7 Ways to Live Past 100]

However, the findings of five new studies now strongly disagree with this prior work. "I was outraged that Nature, a journal I highly respect, would publish such a travesty," said James Vaupel, a demographer at the Max Planck Odense Center on the Biodemography of Aging in Denmark. Vaupel co-founded the International Database on Longevity, one of the databases analyzed in the previous study. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/59645-no-limit-to-human-life-span.html

 

[EnolaGaia]

... In a study published in October in the journal Nature, Jan Vijg, a molecular geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and his colleagues concluded that humans may have reached their maximum life span. ... They argued that the human maximum reported age at death had apparently generally plateaued at about 115. ...

... However, the findings of five new studies now strongly disagree with this prior work. ...

Here's an example of studies disagreeing with the above-cited paper - an Italian study suggesting the death rate levels out at around 105 and insinuating there's no clear limit beyond that point ...

How Long Can We Live? The Limit Hasn’t Been Reached, Study Finds
The mortality rate flattens among the oldest of the old, a study of elderly Italians concludes, suggesting that the oldest humans have not yet reached the limits of life span. ...

Since 1900, average life expectancy around the globe has more than doubled, thanks to better public health, sanitation and food supplies. But a new study of long-lived Italians indicates that we have yet to reach the upper bound of human longevity.

“If there’s a fixed biological limit, we are not close to it,” said Elisabetta Barbi, a demographer at the University of Rome. Dr. Barbi and her colleagues published their research Thursday in the journal Science.

The current record for the longest human life span was set 21 years ago, when Jeanne Calment, a Frenchwoman, died at the age of 122. No one has grown older since — as far as scientists know.

In 2016, a team of scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx made the bold claim that Ms. Calment was even more of an outlier than she seemed. They argued that humans have reached a fixed life span limit, which they estimated to be about 115 years. ...

A number of critics lambasted that research. “The data set was very poor, and the statistics were profoundly flawed,” said Siegfried Hekimi, a biologist at McGill University. ...

SOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/science/human-age-limit.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

SEE ALSO: https://www.livescience.com/62942-human-life-span-limit.html

 

[maximus otter]

“...the new estimated global average for life expectancy at birth in 2019 [is] 72.6 years, a new record high.

...life expectancy has risen from 45.7 years in 1950 to 72.6 years today – or 20.3 weeks per year since 1950, on average.”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/science...wth-work-poverty-UKs-statistic-year-2019.html

maximus otter

 

[Ermintruder]

72.6 years

That's an ever-more proximate figure for us all to keep in our cross-hairs...

life expectancy has risen from 45.7 years in 1950

Nope. Not buying that. Will now read the Daily Wail reference, but 'three score & ten'/Methusila/aged veterans & venerables....even when we're being beaten by the blunt statistical weapon of averages, this just does not sound representative.

 

[madmath]

Nope. Not buying that. Will now read the Daily Wail reference, but 'three score & ten'/Methusila/aged veterans & venerables....even when we're being beaten by the blunt statistical weapon of averages, this just does not sound representative.

Average life expectancy across all people, not maximum lifespan. Improvements in that average came as fewer children died thanks to vaccines and other medical improvements. Also in 1950 there were a significant number of people who'd had their lives ended violently or by diseases, notably the 1918 influenza pandemic.

 

[Jim]

Average life expectancy across all people, not maximum lifespan. Improvements in that average came as fewer children died thanks to vaccines and other medical improvements. Also in 1950 there were a significant number of people who'd had their lives ended violently or by diseases, notably the 1918 influenza pandemic.

I remeber my grandma telling me how when she was a young girl the 1918 influenza pandemic took her mother and take time my great grandmother was in her 30's and healthy until....

 

[EnolaGaia]

This new Scientific American article describes recent research that evaluated the prospective range of human lifespans in a different way and yields an estimated maximum human lifespan in the range of 120 - 150 years.

The Maximum Human Life Span Is 150 Years, New Research Estimates

... Researchers have now taken on the question of how long we can live if, by some combination of serendipity and genetics, we do not die from cancer, heart disease or getting hit by a bus. They report that when omitting things that usually kill us, our body’s capacity to restore equilibrium to its myriad structural and metabolic systems after disruptions still fades with time. And even if we make it through life with few stressors, this incremental decline sets the maximum life span for humans at somewhere between 120 and 150 years. In the end, if the obvious hazards do not take our lives, this fundamental loss of resilience will do so, the researchers conclude in findings published on May 25 in Nature Communications. ...

For the study, Timothy Pyrkov ... and his colleagues looked at this “pace of aging” in three large cohorts in the U.S., the U.K. and Russia. To evaluate deviations from stable health, they assessed changes in blood cell counts and the daily number of steps taken and analyzed them by age groups.

For both blood cell and step counts, the pattern was the same: as age increased, some factor beyond disease drove a predictable and incremental decline in the body’s ability to return blood cells or gait to a stable level after a disruption. When Pyrkov and his colleagues in Moscow and Buffalo, N.Y., used this predictable pace of decline to determine when resilience would disappear entirely, leading to death, they found a range of 120 to 150 years. (In 1997 Jeanne Calment, the oldest person on record to have ever lived, died in France at the age of 122.) ...

FULL STORY: https://www.scientificamerican.com/...ife-span-is-150-years-new-research-estimates/

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here are the bibliographic details and abstract from the newly reported research on estimated maximum human lifespan.

Pyrkov, T.V., Avchaciov, K., Tarkhov, A.E. et al.
Longitudinal analysis of blood markers reveals progressive loss of resilience and predicts human lifespan limit.
Nat Commun 12, 2765 (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23014-1

Abstract
We investigated the dynamic properties of the organism state fluctuations along individual aging trajectories in a large longitudinal database of CBC measurements from a consumer diagnostics laboratory. To simplify the analysis, we used a log-linear mortality estimate from the CBC variables as a single quantitative measure of the aging process, henceforth referred to as dynamic organism state indicator (DOSI). We observed, that the age-dependent population DOSI distribution broadening could be explained by a progressive loss of physiological resilience measured by the DOSI auto-correlation time. Extrapolation of this trend suggested that DOSI recovery time and variance would simultaneously diverge at a critical point of 120 − 150 years of age corresponding to a complete loss of resilience. The observation was immediately confirmed by the independent analysis of correlation properties of intraday physical activity levels fluctuations collected by wearable devices. We conclude that the criticality resulting in the end of life is an intrinsic biological property of an organism that is independent of stress factors and signifies a fundamental or absolute limit of human lifespan.

FULL REPORT: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23014-1

 

[Comfortably Numb]

We cannot cheat aging and death, study indicates

University of Southern Denmark
21 June, 2021

Philosophers, artists and scientists -- and probably all the rest of us -- have long obsessed over the key to human immortality. We all, no matter our income, culture or religion are bound to die. Even if we escape mortal diseases or accidents, we all face a deadly biological deterioration. While the debate of human longevity has divided the scientific community for centuries, a new study finds fresh evidence for our inevitable death.

(...)

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210616094141.htm

 

[ramonmercado]

This new Scientific American article describes recent research that evaluated the prospective range of human lifespans in a different way and yields an estimated maximum human lifespan in the range of 120 - 150 years.

FULL STORY: https://www.scientificamerican.com/...ife-span-is-150-years-new-research-estimates/

Some more doubts about Calment.

Jeanne Calment died aged 122 in 1997, setting an unsurpassed human longevity record.

But there is growing skepticism about her claimed age. The usual problem of poor 19th-century recordkeeping is not in play here: her family was well-off and the birth certificate is not in doubt. But specific problems pop up soon enough. First, details on her daughter's death certificate invite the suspicion the daughter adopted her mother's identity. Second, family photos were destroyed when requested by authorities. Third, in the decades since Calment passed away, a statistical curve of super-centenarian deaths has emerged that tapers cleanly in the 110s. Death at 122 is a conspicuous outlier from an increasingly well-populated distribution.

At times, Jeanne's inconsistencies could be quite telling. She would sometimes refer to her husband as "my father", or say that her mother's last name "Gilles" comes from her grandmother, although Jeanne did not have a grandmother with such last name. One of the most revealing things Jeanne said was that as a child she was taken to school by their maid, Marthe Fousson. However, according to a 1911 census, Marthe Fousson was 10 years younger than Jeanne, so the only person she could have accompanied to school was Yvonne, with whom she lived according to the same census.

https://boingboing.net/2021/07/27/j...-being-might-not-have-been-122-after-all.html

 

[GNC]

Maybe her memory was going? You do tend to forget things when you get older. Like your age (?).

 

[ramonmercado]

Keep chugging those energy drinks.

Researchers first sifted the amino acid taurine from a sample of ox bile in 1827. Today, it’s better known as one of the main ingredients in many energy drinks. But it may do more than drive sales of these beverages. A study published today in Science suggests boosting taurine levels increases life span in mice and improves the physical condition of middle-aged monkeys, hinting it could do the same for people.

“This might be something that could be used to fight aging-related diseases or increase life span in humans,” says molecular physiologist Dudley Lamming of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, who wasn’t connected to the study. “We need to figure that out.”

Taurine’s known roles include helping cells balance their water content and aiding the liver’s production of bile, a fluid that promotes digestion. Our bodies make some of the taurine we need, but we can also obtain it by eating foods such as shellfish and meat. Taurine has long been sold as a dietary supplement that purportedly increases exercise performance and strength. Many energy drinks are brimming with it. A single can of some drink brands can contain about one-third of the daily maximum intake recommended by the Mayo Clinic. ...

https://www.science.org/content/art...y-drinks-makes-mice-live-longer-and-healthier