Hi,

I am usually just lurking, but as an Archaeologist who has an interest in
osteoarchaeology I just want to clear up a few common misconceptions, that
don't get cleared up in the article.  In archaeology we use three ages:

cultural age: Do the remains belong to someone who would have been
considered as a child? or an elder?
biological age: The age that the bones would be, usually compared to a
standard taken from white males who fell in the Vietnam war.
chronological age: The age in years.

Logically we almost never know the chronological age and seldom the
cultural age. When an archaeologist is cited somewhere he refers to the
biological age which is not accurate but hey, we have nothing else to work
with.

There are several projects going on at the moment where we are gathering
more data from remains with a more diverse background and paying attention
to such things as the food.

It is no secret that our food changes things like bone growth rate and
there are other, unknown factors too and for neanderthal and denisovan all
bets are off because of the different methylation of DNA. So mostly if you
ask an osteoarchaologist you never get a straight answer to the
chronological age, especially if the remains were not complete. And for
people over 35 there is not much which clearly gives away the age so "she
was over 35" becomes easily "she was 35" in the newspaper even though she
could have been 60.

With the development of new methods and new databases we can maybe soon
give a clear answer to the question of chronological age, but not today. My
personal guess would be that most palaeolithic people lived to be over 60,
but again: this is only my educated guess.

Btw I know several archaeologists who changed to paleodiet because they
have seen what grain does to the bones and what lack of wild greens does to
bones.

I hope this cleared more up then confused.

Nadja


On 15 October 2014 14:33, Geoffrey Purcell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I was just randomly googling the main paleodiet site and found this
> article which debunks the notion that palaeolithic humans lived very  short
> lives:-
>
> http://paleodiet.com/life-expectancy.htm
>
> I have to admit that up till now I had sort of assumed that palaeo humans
> could not have lived much into old age except possibly  for  tribal
> shamans  who might have been well-protected by their tribes. But the
> various arguments in the article  are very persuasive.
>
> Geoff
>