From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Apr 15 2003 - 19:46:28 MDT
On Tue, 15 Apr 2003, Damien Sullivan commenting on comments by Mez
I think wrote:
> > those became risk factors. 75% of them were dead by age 18! So this
>
> Cite for that number?
It is general "common" knowledge among people who study demography.
The number may not be as high as 75% everywhere but it probably tends
to be culture specific and it *is* high.
I would guess that one might find references in works by Austad,
Olshansky or Vaupel. Almost anyone who writes a review or book
on longevity will cite a figure like this. I've read some of the
papers on which such conclusions are based and it revolves around
a lot of digging in cemeteries and computing the age of death of
the various skeletons found.
Life was pretty brutal before modern times. Now -- whether it was
*that* brutal in paleolithic times is probably open to debate since
I don't believe we have that many paleolithic cemeteries. If the
recent data on human cannibalism [1] is accurate then one might not
have had much to put into the cemetery.
Robert
1. Humans apparently have variants of the prion protein that
when carried in its heterozygous variants (one of each type)
can protect one from kuru (the human variant of Mad Cow disease).
This "mixed" genotype is apparently present in much higher numbers
in the population than one would expect from normal genetics -- thus
there may have been a selection effect *for* this genotype among
ancestral cannibals.
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