Chimpanzee age span1/10/2024 ![]() ![]() ![]() The Hadza lived-as ancient humans and chimpanzees did-in a natural environment teeming with pathogens and parasites. In addition, Blurton-Jones obtained some earlier census data on the Hadza from two other researchers. Then the pair updated this census information six times in the 15 years that followed, noting down the names of all who had died and the causes of their death. Journeying from one camp to another, the two researchers collected basic demographic data, checking each Hadza household and recording the names and ages of the inhabitants. With field assistant Gudo Mahiya, Blurton-Jones traveled to the isolated camps of the Hadza, hunter-gatherers who lived much as their ancestors had, hunting baboons and wildebeest, digging starchy tubers and collecting honey during the rainy season from hives of the African honeybee. In 1985 Nicholas Blurton-Jones, a biological anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, set off by Land Rover across the trackless bush in Tanzania's Lake Eyasi basin. Hints that modern health practices might not be solely responsible for our long life span have come from studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer groups. If Finch is right, future research on the complex links among infection, host defense and the chronic diseases of the elderly may revolutionize scientists' understanding of aging and how to cope with the challenges it brings. Marshaling data from fields as diverse as physical anthropology, primatology, genetics and medicine, he now proposes a controversial new hypothesis: that the trend toward slower aging and longer lives began much, much earlier, as our human ancestors evolved an increasingly powerful defense system to fight off the many pathogens and irritants in ancient environments. But critical as they were to extending human life, they are only part of the longevity puzzle, Finch warrants. Indeed, much demographic evidence shows that these factors greatly extended human life over the past 200 years. Most researchers chalk up our supersized life span to the advent of vaccines, antibiotics and other medical advances, the development of efficient urban sanitation systems, and the availability of fresh, nutritious vegetables and fruit year-round. Finch walks over to the van, grinning as he surveys the cargo. As envoys from an era long before modern health care, they will offer case studies of aging in the past. Cocooned in dusty textiles and interred in arid desert tombs, their naturally mummified bodies preserve critical new clues to the mystery of human longevity. The cadavers in the van belong to men, women and children who perished along this stretch of coastal desert as much as 1,800 years ago, long before the Spanish conquest. ![]() Finch has come to Lima to find out why-by peering into the distant past. in 2009 possessed a life expectancy at birth of 78.5 years. Our nearest surviving relatives, the chimpanzees, have a life expectancy at birth of about 13 years. Our kind is remarkably long-lived compared with other primates. Tall, gaunt and graying, with a Father Time–style beard, the 75-year-old scientist has devoted his career to the study of human aging. Onlooker Caleb Finch, a biologist at the University of Southern California, has been waiting for this moment for months. Within minutes, two men wheel the first body into the institute's imaging unit. As the driver clambers out, an assistant hustles off in search of a hospital gurney. Seated in a small waiting area to the rear of the building, a throng of well-dressed researchers and government officials watches intently. On a Sunday morning in a decaying and dangerous inner-city barrio in Lima, Peru, an unmarked white van carrying nearly a dozen bodies rumbles to a stop on the grounds of the National Institute of Neurological Sciences. ![]()
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