On Tue, 9 Jan 2001 12:32:10 +0100, Alison Ashwell
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Amadeus Schmidt wrote:
>>
>> And after these people didn't grew verz old-- how could they have
>> experienced osteoporosis as today.
>
>Most of the suggested "age at deaths" for human bones have been shown by
>the excavations at the Spitalfields vault in London to be inaccurate -
>underestimated  by 20 or more years! [Spittalflields was a Graveyard
>excavation and about 1000 of the coffins had engraved plates with the
>ages of the deceased. The bones were examined and the ages determined by
>the formulae used by anthropologist/archaologists  - when compared with
>the engraved plates the archaeologists were found to have consistently
>underestimated the age of death]

The graveyard your talk of was rather recent, wasn't it?
(at least they used coffins and used written plates....)
The wear-off schemes of bones would be quite different since paleolithicum,
I suppose.
However, of course the estimation formulas are only estimations and could
be wrong.
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.

We tend to expect some more years of living, don't we?
(at last me as I'm 41)

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).

regards

Amadeus S.