
Do we really live longer than our ancestors? - sea6ear
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181002-how-long-did-ancient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity
======
apo
_Our maximum lifespan may not have changed much, if at all. But that’s not to
delegitimise the extraordinary advances of the last few decades which have
helped so many more people reach that maximum lifespan, and live healthier
lives overall._

The benefits of some of those advances are questionable at best. Those who
have visited a nursing home may know what I'm talking about.

Spending the last decade of your life commuting to doctor's offices (or
bedridden) ain't no picnic, nor is rotting away in a forgotten corner of a
human warehouse.

The quality of life position has always intrigued me for this reason.
Sometimes what technology giveth with one hand, society taketh away with the
other.

~~~
mikekchar
On the other hand, because I live in rural Japan and am only really friends
with the people who live near me, almost all of my friends are over 70 (I'm
50). While this is of course selection bias (as well as being anecdotal),
people I associate with don't end up in nursing homes -- at least long term. A
quick google search tells me that only between 2 and 5% of people over 65 live
in nursing homes and that jives pretty well with my experience. Most people
seem to live pretty well until a year or so before they die, and then they
essentially fall off a cliff.

My wife's aunt passed away last year from some kind of brain issue (I never
did figure out exactly what the problem was -- lack of vocabulary). She was in
and out of the hospital for about 3 months and while distressing, I think she
very much appreciated being alive in those 3 months. After that she
essentially ended up in a kind of semi-coma where she was awake for maybe an
hour a day -- and she was in a nursing home. After another 5 months or so she
passed away. I don't know if she got much value from those 5 months, but I
know her husband definitely was able to use the time to come to grips with the
reality of the situation. Again, just an anecdote, but I think it's
illustrative of the complexity of the situation.

Anyway, I think most people can look forward to enjoying their old age. Of
course it makes a big difference if you look after your body when you are
young and it is _much_ easier to do so.

~~~
coldtea
> _On the other hand, because I live in rural Japan and am only really friends
> with the people who live near me, almost all of my friends are over 70 (I 'm
> 50). While this is of course selection bias (as well as being anecdotal),
> people I associate with don't end up in nursing homes -- at least long
> term._

That's not what selection bias is -- that's just an accurate reporting of what
you see around you. It would be selection bias if you additionally claimed
that this must be the case elsewhere too.

~~~
mikekchar
I just mean that I don't hang out in nursing homes, so all of the 70+ people I
know are those who aren't in nursing homes. This may cause me to believe that
older people don't normally live in nursing homes. Probably I could have
explained that better :-)

------
sandworm101
Be careful when reading about the age "40" and "80" in some ancient cultures.
"40" used to be a term for "many", as we might say "millions" when we really
mean "a great many". Mohammed was 40 when he received god's message. Ali Baba
had his 40 thieves. Moses wandered in the desert for 40 years. The Noah
suffered 40 days and nights of rain. There is a famous story in Islam of a
woman being stung by a scorpion 40 times while at prayer. So a tale of a woman
being 80 years old, a suspicious doubling of 40, should probably be read to
say that she was very very old rather than literally eighty.

~~~
mamcx
This sound incredible unbelievable. Also, all the cultures across centuries
use the same idea?

Exist many samples of the use of numbers in the thousands, btw..

~~~
kmm
Mohammed, the people who told the story of Ali Baba and the ancient Jews all
spoke Semitic languages. As with a lot of metaphors, it might have come with
the language. Like how early Indo-European cultures had patrilocality and sky
gods

~~~
int_19h
Things like these can jump across language and culture boundaries easily, too.

In Russian, there's a fairly obvious pattern to numerals like 20, 30, 50, 60,
70, 80, 90. It's not super consistent, but you can easily pick each of those
apart and see that it references the corresponding digit, plus some variation
of "ten".

Note that I didn't list 40. That's because it's special - it has its own word
for it, that is completely unrelated to the word for 4 or any other number.
Its etymology is contested, but it's certain that it was already special many
centuries back, and used to count things (in groups of 40). And then you have
archaic idioms like "forty forties", which basically means "hell of a lot".

Of course, it can well just be convergent evolution - there's only so many
round numbers. And then if you pick one as the standard size of the group for
counting, and it's large enough, then a square of that number is also a fairly
natural choice for "many". But identical choices in other cultures might give
the initial push, or reinforce one of the early roughly equal candidates.

------
martin-adams
I've always been frustrated by these figures because life expectancy has gone
up due to reducing infant mortality. It doesn't mean our lifestyle has made
humans live longer.

It would appear that a more useful metric is number of centenarians per
million. On the 1.1.1960, England & Wales had 11.6 centenarians per million.
On the 1.1.1990 this increased to 76.3 centenarians per million.[1]

Another way to look at it is the risk of death for a given age tracked over
time.[2] If you were 60 years old in 1900, would you have a higher risk of
death compared to 2000?

[1]
[https://www.demogr.mpg.de/Papers/Books/Monograph2/search.htm](https://www.demogr.mpg.de/Papers/Books/Monograph2/search.htm)
[2]
[http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html](http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html)

~~~
MarkMc
You may find this graph useful: [https://ourworldindata.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/05/Life-e...](https://ourworldindata.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-by-age-in-the-UK-1700-to-2013.png)

It suggests that life expectancy has gone up sinificantly for all age groups,
not just life expectancy at birth.

~~~
883771773929
Here's the methods protocol [0] for designing version 6 of the Human Mortality
Database being visualized at that link.

Notice how I explicity said the word _designing_ and not something like
'calculating' which would misleadingly characterize such a scheme as something
that is objectively derivable from verifiable information with valid
uncertainty bounds and without the potential for advocating policy with
dubious constructed data.

If you've ever thought p-hacking was a riot in academia's social sciences
bullshitting, wait until you read through stuff like this with think-tanks
coming up with whatever numbers are necessary to justify a policy to secure
more funding to shroud misinformation in a thin veil of perceived scientific
validity to people who feel comforted if you just put on a white coat. Not
only does it go through "careful rexaminations" of methodology with new
versions every year tweaking subtle but fundamental things like "we used to
assume uniform distributions of births across the entire year on v.5 and as of
v.6 now we decided to assume a proprietary non-uniform distribution that
flucuates per year (and our policy objectives...) because there were wars that
changed reproductive strategies that we conveniently forgot to account for
that last year and the error cascades through to every successive year's death
risk. Stay tuned for v.7!"

On top of that and pretty much a direct consequence of this so called
'research' being complete bollocks, is that none of this junk is ever peer-
reviewed. Couldn't even clear that hurdle.

Sorry to ruin your parade but the statistics accessible via think-tanks and
public governments are a complete fabrication. Want to see actual life
expectancy tables? You need to buyout a multi-national insurance conglomerate
that has survived the test of time with financial crises and political cycles,
peeking into actuary tables without the gimmicks of literal data engineering.
I highly doubt you, nor anyone here, would ever get close to these secrets.
And even then, the usual business model of such corporations that can attain
that large of a risk pool and _could_ identify these stats are usually
incentivized to profit from regulatory capture rather than the public-face
tagline of accurately predicting the likelihood of risk to perfectly balance
premiums against claims and extract profit from investing on the float.

[0]
[https://www.mortality.org/Public/Docs/MethodsProtocol.pdf](https://www.mortality.org/Public/Docs/MethodsProtocol.pdf)

~~~
coldtea
Think tanks and political organizations (including government bodies, the UN
and such) are more in the business of selling numbers, than reflecting reality
accurately.

The problem is that most others don't have access to the infrastructure and
raw data to get accurate numbers themselves (or redo the data collection with
better methodology).

~~~
883771773929
I don't have the link right now, but one of my favorite tales is a group of
traders who called the bluff of both a pervasive incumbent government spouting
all kinds of GDP fudging nonsense around the election cycle and a sprawling
company who tends to work closely with and aggressively court rusted towns
down on their luck as a source of cheap labor with dependent customers who are
forced to rely on conditional subsidies that serve to keep labor in line
during a growth hacking period to monopolize and export the company-town model
requiring more negotiating leverage by leading shareholders with over-
optimistic revenue guidance.

Of course, the story is more of a feel-good rationalization of fickle lottery
tickets, due to the realism of "the market can be irrational longer than you
can remain solvent" even if you're correct and especially due to the
incentives involved to keep the insanity going as long as possible, bail out
insiders, and conveniently backtrack on contracts due to concerns that
actually losing money as a counter-party is not acceptable for the entrenched
interests because the boogeyman of contagion would spread as the house of
cards comes collapsing down with highly leveraged banks and pension funds
unwinding the horrible bets they made that were rationalized by a feeling of
untouchability when cozzying up with politicians.

But the details of the story are more interesting in that the methods used,
such as realtime satellite based photography to more accurately estimate sales
are definitely out of the current realm of accessible infrastructure and data
collection methods for mere mortals who know in the back of their mind the
stats are a ruse but can't possibly prove it.

------
poulsbohemian
Anecdata: I can trace my maternal family tree back approximately 600 years,
with records also available for a number of siblings, cousins, etc - so pretty
robust data. It's obvious when a flu or similar came through, because you'll
notice a number of clustered, young deaths. Meanwhile, those that survive into
adulthood were living 70-90 years, and in my direct line generally on the long
end of that. This would appear to line up with our genetic markers as well
(thanks 23andMe). In my ex's family, genetically there is a clear propensity
for cancer, so many deaths in the 50-60 range.

So, what's my point on all this? My own anecdata tells me:

1) Eat real food, like those long-lived ancestors. 2) Move / exercise. Most of
them were physically active farmers, while I sit here coding away at a desk.
3) Hope you don't have any obvious genetic markers for cancer, heart disease,
etc. 4) Be thankful for modern sanitation and immunization! Get your shots,
including flu shots!

~~~
austinjp
While I generally agree with (2), and (1) is likely right for the wrong
reasons, it's (3) and (4) that are the real trump cards. Mainly (3).

~~~
883771773929
If any of those, (3) is the red herring. Your genetic markers are not write-
once-at-gamete-recombination / read-only-at-every-transcription. The genetic
code humans have includes many graceful degradation mechanisms that allow for
plasticity in widely varying conditions. Many 'code sequences' are actually
selected by the environment throughout an individual organism's life and the
resulting signaling pathways can amplify or suppress various fallback modes.

There's a lot of these scenarios that are well documented, anything from the
loosely defined and often poorly understood epigenetics processes, but also
the signaling regulation of cell growth and death, resulting changes with
hormesis, acclimatization, availability/scarcity of nutrients, hormones,
pharmaceuticals, viruses, and even mental state.

(1) is typically the largest factor of all that listed, with experiments
showing repeatedly that 'genetic markers' specifying risk for heart disease,
cancer, etc all vastly improve with a reduction of excess body fat and
elimination of recreational drug usage such as excessive alcohol and
cigarettes.

And as for (4), definitely a trump card is not taking a dump in your drinking
water supply without reasonable recycling treatment. Many people tend to
associate the medical industry as responsible for the supposed improved living
conditions of modern developed countries. However, if you look at the repeated
succession stages of colonialization throughout the past several hundred
years, it's obvious that when people in underdeveloped countries stop shitting
in their food and water, illness and resulting death plummet until a few
generations later when economically enforced diets and 'sensible medical care'
are in full effect leading to a rebound of misery.

~~~
dennis_jeeves
Hi 883771773929, I noticed your posts. It chimes in with what I understand.
You seem to be an objective and intelligent guy. I’m always interested in
groups/individuals that may further my own ability to survive in this nutty
world. So care to share your email, and/or the groups ( online or otherwise)
that you think is worthy of attention, with me? Email is on my profile.

------
philipkglass
People who didn't die of violence, hunger, infectious diseases, accidents, or
complications of child bearing could expect roughly as much remaining life
span as adults as adults expect today. When you strike those caveats and look
at every human born on Earth: yes, people really do live significantly longer
now. Whether or not you find this surprising depends on how much you already
knew about leading causes of death in centuries past.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
The highest mortality was in the first five years of course. Take that out of
the comparison and the figures change surprisingly.

Once you got past that, and assuming you didn't get dragged off to war or
succumb to some sort of pestilence, life span wasn't so different.

Which makes watching or reading period fiction frustrating when they treat a
40 year old as we might an 80 year old. We live longer, but we sure don't age
at half speed.

~~~
philipkglass
I haven't encountered period fiction where a 40 year old is treated like an 80
year old, but that would grate on me too.

There was still a significantly lowered life expectancy in adulthood due to
disease, hunger, violence, childbearing, accidents.

See for example John Graunt's life table of Tudor period Londoners:

[http://www.stat.rice.edu/stat/FACULTY/courses/stat431/Graunt...](http://www.stat.rice.edu/stat/FACULTY/courses/stat431/Graunt.pdf)

Only 25% (!) of Londoners survived until age 27. More than a third of adults
who lived to 27 died before age 37. In modern London you can neglect
pestilence as almost a rounding error within overall life expectancy, but in
some ages of London-past pestilence was the dominant term.

~~~
sharkmerry
But this is data analyzed in 1661, gathered 127 years prior. so its 1 data
point from 1 year, tough to make an accurate call on it as variance would be
ridiculously high right?

I also did not see any data on sample size, etc.

this seems to say life expectancy was ~50 years if you reached 21.
[https://books.google.com/books?id=T4DLK7zLxYMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...](https://books.google.com/books?id=T4DLK7zLxYMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA8#v=onepage&q&f=false)

graunts life table says 33% chance of living to 21. 8.8% of living to 50.
Shouldnt it be closer to 16%? if average is 50, means 50% beyond, 50% short.
so 50% of 33% would be 16.5%? perhaps Im looking at this wrong

~~~
philipkglass
That table is for aristocrats only. It contains only men. The table also
excludes "those who had died by accidents, violence, poison, or in battle."

Admittedly, Tudor England was not a very urbanized society, so looking at
Londoners alone is also unrepresentative of the whole nation. I think it is at
least a bit broader than 52 noble men who managed not to die of accidents or
violence.

EDIT: a page later in your source, it also notes "These rates [of death for
women] are very high by modern standards... In the 16th and 17th centuries,
11.3% of fertile women died from complications of childbearing."

~~~
sharkmerry
Does Graunt state his sample size? or provide the datasource?

I cant find it. seems odd to dismiss the data i provided based on sample size
when his data is not even avail for scrutiny.

> In the 16th and 17th centuries, 11.3% of fertile women died from
> complications of childbearing."

great, what was the average age of a woman at childbirth? We're discussing
mortality after 21 right?

~~~
philipkglass
According to Graunt's own account, he used London's bills of mortality (weekly
records of deaths in in London parishes) that were kept in the parish clerk
halls. According to the account beginning on page 51 (as numbered in the scan
linked below), the people who collected corpses in London would report to the
parish clerk how many people had died and the manner of death. Every Tuesday
the reports were compiled, printed on Wednesday, published on Thursday. Graunt
claims (page 59) that over a period of 20 years these bills recorded 229,250
deaths. Numbers of births came from records of christenings.

Here is a scan of Graunt's book "Natural and Political Observations mentioned
in a following Index, and made upon the Bills of Mortality." It is old and a
bit hard to read. [http://echo.mpiwg-
berlin.mpg.de/ECHOdocuView?url=/permanent/...](http://echo.mpiwg-
berlin.mpg.de/ECHOdocuView?url=/permanent/echo/mpi_rostock/Graunt_1665/index.meta&start=51&viewMode=index&pn=59)

There is also a transcription of it at Wikisource, but it contains frequent
OCR/transcription errors:

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Natural_and_Political_Observa...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Natural_and_Political_Observations_Made_upon_the_Bills_of_Mortality_\(Graunt_1676\))

Average age of a woman at marriage was 23.5, and vast majority of births were
to married women, so mother's average age at first childbirth was above 24:

[https://www.plimoth.org/sites/default/files/media/pdf/edmate...](https://www.plimoth.org/sites/default/files/media/pdf/edmaterials_demographics.pdf)

There appears to be a large collection of the actual bills of mortality
scanned and archived here:

[https://archive.org/details/collectionyearl00hebegoog](https://archive.org/details/collectionyearl00hebegoog)

------
forkLding
This article is a bit presumptuous.

I don't think I ever equated lifespan with life expectancy, I never ever
thought you would just randomly die of old age at age 30 or even somehow reach
old age at age 30. I merely presumed sickness and war would wipe you out and
you would die of something like that than somehow superhumanly jumping into
your old age as soon as you hit 30.

------
schizoidboy
> Our maximum lifespan may not have changed much, if at all. But that’s not to
> delegitimise the extraordinary advances of the last few decades which have
> helped so many more people reach that maximum lifespan, and live healthier
> lives overall.

Sure, maximum might not be changing much, but the fact that the average has
changed so drastically means there has been unfathomably less death and
suffering than otherwise would have been. Also, the advances have not been
just over the last few decades, but more likely one or two hundred years (i.e.
since the industrial revolution).

There are also serious thinkers (e.g. Kurzweil) who think that biotechnology
will increase maximum lifespan pretty soon. I found it strange for an article
tagged with 'Biology' to not talk about biotechnology potential related to
longevity.

~~~
b_tterc_p
Useful biotechnology may increase life expectancy in the near term, but not so
differently as has been discussed here. We have basically zero chance of
counteracting a life time of bioaccumulant toxins, telomere shortening, and
numerous other shortcomings such that actual maximum lifespan sees a
meaningful bump.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
There are other organisms that do this, so there is no physical limit in this.
It's just an engineering problem.

For example, telomere shortening is already being worked on. Look up Bioviva
science, they have made first human experiments and results look very
promising.

I think people just got used to being fatalist in this regard, because it is
psychologically easier than to tackle this problem.

------
LeanderK
Is there any interesting research happening on what's limiting our lifespan?

Is this super interesting and important question being given enought attention
in the research-community? Or is it super-niche?

~~~
marsrover
Genesis 6:3 Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with humans
forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years."

I think this is pretty interesting even if you're not religious.

~~~
Nition
One thing I always thought was interesting about that is it happened during
Noah's lifetime, when he was probably already older than 120 and lived a few
hundred more years after. He's lucky the new rule wasn't retroactive to those
who were already alive!

Also, there's some debate about whether that line means the obvious (maximum
lifespan of around 120 years), or whether it's actually saying that people
have 120 years left until the great flood comes. Most people (and me
personally as well) think the former but the latter does make _some_ sense as
an interpretation in context. Well, except for the fact that it does mark a
point in the Bible where people's reported lives stopped being ridiculously
long.

~~~
michaelmrose
There is absolutely no reason to believe that Noah was already older than 120
or that he lived longer than a normal life span. There is every reason to
believe that nearly everyone's body falls apart between 50 and 120 if disease
or malice hasn't gotten them prior.

When you fabricate its better if the fabrications concern things either long
ago or far away and if the present situation is different from that described
you have to explain why if you don't want your audience comparing present
reality to prior and seeing through the hoax.

Example if you wanted to posit that insert legendary figure here was 30 feet
tall and came from a village where most were 20' and up you can't set the
story in the next village last year because someone has probably been there
and noticed that people just aren't that tall.

If it was a thousand years prior across an ocean you can claim that people
became less mighty as the years went by and lost touch with their gods which
plays to people's tendency to filter the past through nostalgia.

If a 30 foot tall giant seems less likely than a 900 year old man then you may
need to apply critical thinking skills.

Just because its still socially OK to believe nonsense doesn't mean its true.

~~~
Nition
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it was _all true_. I'm not Christian either.
When I say "Noah lived for hundreds of years" (950 in fact!) I just mean
according to the Bible. Same way I'd say Darth Vader ruled the Empire.

------
hyperpallium
Civilization has the cure of which civilization is the cause.

If you select people who avoid the ills of modern diet and inactivity, while
enjoying modern medicine, you may get a different curve.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
You also get unreliable age reporting. At least in some of the supposedly
long-lived villages outside of civilization (lika Hunza), it has been shown
that when westerners come their and try to study people's age - what they get
in response is not the calendar age, but something akin to "social status". If
you have a big family and many achievements, they say they are 80. If you
haven't achieved that much yet - they call them 60.

~~~
bachbach
Like leveling up in an RPG!

