The Modern Mind May Be 100k Years Old (2016)

Re:The Modern Mind May Be 100k Years Old (2016) by chrisco255 on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @03:10PM (#21984248)

Hunter-gatherers who made it to age 25 were just as likely to live to their 60s as modern folks are today. The 30 year old average life expectancy of Neolithic man comes from two things: one, we cannot properly age skeletal fossils to a degree of certainty after wisdom teeth have fully grown in. You can't tell from a 10k year old fossil if it was a 30 year old or a 55 year old at time of death.

Finally, infant mortality was extremely high and remained very high until modern medicine. These infant deaths decreased the average life expectancy but it masks the lifespan that healthy adults would typically experience.

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Re:The Modern Mind May Be 100k Years Old (2016) by bad_user on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @04:51PM (#21985340)

Infections were a major cause of death, including in infants. Also starvation, violence and the elements.

You can argue that those who survived infections, the elements, violence and starvation were in much better shape to survive everything else.

Also contrary to popular belief, cardiovascular disease happened before modern times, and even if we might be talking of Neolithic only, this happened even in hunter gatherer populations. Found these pretty interesting:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067361...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

In modern times what we have is much less violence, vaccines, antibiotics, a healthcare system capable of healing injuries or restore you after heart attacks, etc and in spite of prevailing beliefs we’ve got proper nutrition and at least in the industrialized countries we aren’t dying of starvation or nutritional deficiencies anymore.

Our problem is “energy poisoning”. Once we figure out how to not eat so damn much, we’ll eliminate most chronic disease we have today.

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