Serene Vannoy wrote:
> ImStillMags wrote:
>
>> That is the usual argument. The reason people died at a younger age
>> was this.......medicine and the advances in medical practice.
>
>> Life was a bit harder. We were still hunter gatherers. If someone
>> was injured while hunting, or got a cut infected, or broke a bone or a
>> tooth, too bad. Only so much the medicine man or witch doctor or
>> wise woman could do.
>
>> Longevity increased as medicine progressed.

Life expectancy increased. That's not quite the same thing as maximum
life span. The few who lucked out still lived to 80 or longer. In the
few hunter gatherer societies tha tstill exist some make it to 80 or
older.

In the modern world the record for maximum life span is 122 years.
There are history books booking back very far that claim there have been
many who lived to older than 100.

Given the populations involved it appears that the maximum human life
span has not changed at all since the stone age. There has just been
better medicine and a higher total population to allow some people to be
very far out on the bell curve. Many can live into their 80s and 90s,
some into the 100s and every decade after than the curve continues so
that many billions are needed to get more in each decade after that.

Right now there are several people alive in the world who are 114
according to wikipedia. The record of 122 by Jeanne Clement of France
is in no danger of getting broken any time soon.

> Sure, and it's still meaningless to say that we should eat what we ate
> way back then, when life was completely different and our bodies did
> completely different things.

Because of the difference between life expectancy and maximum life span
it does have meaning. Humans had time in the stone age to evolve to
adjust significantly to their diet. It takes about 5 million years for
evolution to put a species into its optimal diet and humans have used
fire for between 1 and 2 million years and were hunter gatherers for
nearly 5 million. We're evolved hunter gatherers.

Animal herding started very roughly 20K years ago and didn't much change
the diet. Grain farming started roughly 10-15K years ago and did change
the diet a lot. We have not had time to evolve in response.

How much should our diets fit the paleolithic pattern? Jeanne Clement
who lived to the age of 122 at a French diet that included bread.
Clearly it's possible to be healthy with modern food. But it's not the
first guess to take.