Ancient Man and Degenerative disease

[NU_nutrition_TS]

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Personally I have always thought that the "average life-span of thirty" hung around the neck of early man was a crock of the proverbial.

It is a statistic ... arrived at by taking death at all ages and then dividing by the population total. Let me show you some figures that illustrate the fallacious logic involved.

The population is 1000. Of every birth half result in a death before the age of two days. Sad, but entirely feasible if you were born in a cave I would say. Past the age of two days, though, everyone dies at the age of 100. Average age of death therefore is fifty. Now imagine the same scenario but now imagine instead of dying at two days you die at ten years. Hey presto the average of death is now 55. The population growth is the same in both cases, as is the number of old people, indeed as is the number of people aged 11 or over.

How many starlings die before they leave the nest? I don't know but I imagine the figure is quite gruesome. Does this mean that no starling ever reaches its potential full life span? Statistically yes it does ... in real, squawking, messy, feather-flying life of course not. Birds quite often manage to fall out of trees having died of old-age as opposed to a having short, one-sided conversation with next door's cat.

Don't forget that the measurements involved in dating bones are taken from modern populations with modern diets, and this extrapolation might be quite erroneous. If you look at "forgotten tribes" living in the Brazillian rain forests or those of New Guinea there seem to be an awful lot of old people around for a population with an average life span (not age, notice) of thirty. Their example would give a much better idea of stone-age population dynamics than a classroom model I would say.

Just my tuppence.

I agree entirely - I have often argued this point myself and been shot down in flames! Even during the Victorian era, average life-spans are given in low numbers due to the high rates of infant mortality (average life-expectancy ~40 while 3 out of every 20 babies died before the age of one) yet there are many examples of Victorians who lived to very advanced ages - even Queen Victoria lived to be 82 while William Banting lived to be 81.

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Whenever a natural history documentary shows a ancient looking tribal elder, the shot often is coupled with a voiceover "bongo, the tribal chief has lived all his life in the forest, at 36 he...etc etc", they can age badly.

As Indiana Jones said in Raiders of the Lost Ark: "It's not the years it's the mileage"! I dare say you can find examples of indigenous peoples who look more ravaged by time even at relatively young ages but the point being made is that lifespans were not restricted to 30 years old irrespective of appearance. What is also important is the state of health and physical fitness of older indigenous people compared to 'civilised westerners' - very often westerners in advanced years are physically and mentally impaired and are kept going by pharmaceutical and surgical interventions not available to a rainforest-dwelling tribesman.

[hailtotheking]

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What is also important is the state of health and physical fitness of older indigenous people compared to 'civilised westerners' - very often westerners in advanced years are physically and mentally impaired and are kept going by pharmaceutical and surgical interventions not available to a rainforest-dwelling tribesman.

That sounds remarkably like Weston Price in 'Nutrition and Physical Degeneration'

[hailtotheking]

The earliest records i heard of for evidence of widespread degenerative disease were in the mummies of ancient Egyptian royalty. They had signs of significant osteoarthritis and heart disease.

[NU_nutrition_TS]

Latest study confirms human stature and health was negatively affected by shift to agriculture:
eScienceCommons: Dawn of agriculture took toll on health

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When populations around the globe started turning to agriculture around 10,000 years ago, regardless of their locations and type of crops, a similar trend occurred: The height and health of the people declined.

“This broad and consistent pattern holds up when you look at standardized studies of whole skeletons in populations,” says Amanda Mummert, an Emory graduate student in anthropology.

Mummert (in photo at right) led the first comprehensive, global review of the literature regarding stature and health during the agriculture transition, to be published by the journal Economics and Human Biology.

“Many people have this image of the rise of agriculture and the dawn of modern civilization, and they just assume that a more stable food source makes you healthier,” Mummert says. “But early agriculturalists experienced nutritional deficiencies and had a harder time adapting to stress, probably because they became dependent on particular food crops, rather than having a more significantly diverse diet.”

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“Culturally, we’re agricultural chauvinists. We tend to think that producing food is always beneficial, but the picture is much more complex than that,” says Emory anthropologist George Armelagos, co-author of the review. “Humans paid a heavy biological cost for agriculture, especially when it came to the variety of nutrients. Even now, about 60 percent of our calories come from corn, rice and wheat.”

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“Unless you’re considering a complete skeleton, you’re not getting a full picture of health,” Mummert says. “You could have an individual with perfect teeth, for example, but serious markers of infection elsewhere. You could see pitting on the skull, likely related to anemia or nutritional stress, but no marks at all on the long bones.”

Adult height, dental cavities and abscesses, bone density and healed fractures are some of the markers used to try to paint a more complete picture of an individual’s health.

“Bones are constantly remodeling themselves,” Mummert says. “Skeletons don’t necessarily tell you what people died of, but they can almost always give you a glimpse into their ability to adapt and survive.”

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“I think it’s important to consider what exactly ‘good health’ means,” Mummert says. “The modernization and commercialization of food may be helping us by providing more calories, but those calories may not be good for us. You need calories to grow bones long, but you need rich nutrients to grow bones strong.”

[amiller]

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Latest study confirms human stature and health was negatively affected by shift to agriculture:
eScienceCommons: Dawn of agriculture took toll on health

If interested, here's a link for the full article:
uploading.com/files/587479mm/sdarticle.pdf/

[NU_nutrition_TS]

^ Ta! Saved and will read at my leisure!