Amadeus Schmidt wrote:
> The graveyard your talk of was rather recent, wasn't it?
> (at least they used coffins and used written plates....)

The bodies were buried between 1729 and 1852 - however the point of the
exercise was to check the method known as the "Complex Method" for
telling the age of death, as well as to see what diseases had been
suffered etc.
One of the previous assumptions was that elderly women would have lost a
lot of bone density through osteoporosis and this was not found to be
the case at all.


> I don't remember any article or study, where old aged peple in paleolithic
> times were assumed. Some extremes can have reached old ages, but 40 I think
> is assumed as the common old age of death.

Yes, it is the assumed age of death but is likely to be wrong going by
the fact that the healthy bones of the Spitalfields bodies were assumed
to be younger at death than they actually were.
Although the Spitalfields bodies were not eating a paleo diet in life,
they were not eating a diet rich in processed foods/sugar either. Even
their bread would have been less processed
>
> If you reinterpret all scientific studies as to be wrong in age estimations
> you're moving on a thin ice for safety against osteoporisis (and other
> diseases).
>

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

Alison