Fair enough; I will jokingly call your post misleading too, then, before continuing onwards.
How is it misleading? Going through, it seems to (sort of) address the one issue you mentioned ("cancer IS a disease of the modern world; We grow about double as old as a few hundred years ago"):
"Almost all the mummies and skeletons were of people who died before the age of 50. "Ageing is one of the major causes of cancer," says Schüz. ... "In men today, 90 per cent of cancers occur after 50," he says. "So if you examined the bodies of 1000 modern men who died before 50, you wouldn't find many cancers either." "
Well, I think this post (not just the headline on HN, the real one, naturally) is misleading because on an uniformed read it could make you assume that cancer is something that has occurred because of the modern lifestyle - and for that there is no direct evidence.
If you look at the rate of the death toll directly related to cancer, it dramatically increases after about 40 and goes high after 50 (as said, except for hereditary cancer, which always has been "around"), as the story correctly quotes. So if that what you thought is all they wanted to say - that everything is as we thought it was all the time (i.e., lifespan increase has increased cancer incidents) - then even more the question of why vote on it?
So my question is at the very least justified in a sense of "why is this new", but much more because the way I understood the way they put things, it seemed to advocate my former take on it, which is dangerously misleading.
