I suppose life expectancy at birth for Pleistocene hominids may have been
around 30 years but not necessarily that low. The main cause of a low
figure would be high mortality rates among infants, children and
adolescents. Life expectancy at 30 may very well have been an additional 25
years or more. How much more can not be estimated by use of available
osteological methods [Isçan, M. Y., Kennedy, K. A. R. (1989).
Reconstruction of life from the skeleton. New York, Wiley-Liss].

Age estimations are very difficult after middle age and fossil remains are
often classified as belonging to a human aged "40 years or more". An age
process is not equally rapid in different humans, samples are often small
and many of the age processes are influenced by lifestyle (e.g. bone loss).
Other problems are lack of contemporary autopsy material for comparison,
bone changes occuring after death, selection bias, different disease
patterns during different times and insufficient standardization of age
estimation methods.

By the way, don't we have any paleoanthropologists or paleopathologists in
the group? If not we ought to go and get some.

Staffan Lindeberg