On Sat, 3 Jun 2000 14:54:01 +1000, Ben Balzer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Hi, just found this- a la what Ray is saying
>http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990313/itnstory1999031312.html
>Ben Balzer

I've read this, and in short , it tells, that ages as assumed from
bone remains are possibly often false, probably often underestimated.
This applies to all kinds of bones, of course.

This one was Maya, therefore clearly neolithic:

>For example, in the 1950s anthropologists dated the bones of the
> 7th-century Mayan king Hanab Pakal as belonging to someone who died in
>  his 40s. Yet when the inscription on the king's tombstone was translated
>three  decades later, it declared that he had died aged 80. "What the new
>research  has done is show that the inscription can be reconciled with the
>bones," says
> Norman Hammond of Boston University, an expert on Mayan civilisation.

However, an *average* age from paleolithic humans can hardly
be found, because they have no graveyards. Nobody knows, how much
of bones of the population was washed away or eaten by hyenas.
Or found later at some strange place.

Also the average age of death includes death rate of small children,
which i think was very high in stone age times.
If one had made it up to a certain age 30 or 40 there are chances for her or
him to live quite long, also in paleo-age.
An 80 year old paleo-human is not so easily imagineable because of the
harsher physical stress on people permanentely moving (nomads we all were).

Also, even some old bone of either neolithic or meso- or paleolithic era
don't tell us about the death rate, say of cancer in earlier ages.
If any population had a custom that caused a death rate of 20% before the
age of 40 (e.g. eating carcinogenous fat remains) , that would hardly show
up in the fossil record.

It may have been even a *benefit* for a moving
population to carry around a smaller population of old aged (as long as
enough old aged remained to serve as the "knowledge database").
But this is not what we would want from an individual point of view.

How good the hunter/gatherer livestyle serves to achieve a healthy old age
would therefore IMHO best be estimated by looking at present h/g cultures.

What is the average age of Inuit and !Kung?
Or the the average age of them, after having reached the age of 5.
I'm shure somebody nearby knows this data.

regards

Amadeus