Hi Todd and Paleopeople:

>.Keep in mind that most
>>of your "paleo-persons" only lived to be 25-35 years old.
>Does anyone have the research, published within the last 4 or 5 years,
>showing that these numbers are probably wrong?

It drives me paleonuts when I hear this too. It has been mentioned before 
on this list that Genesis 5:3-32 lists a number of people who lived well 
beyond 100 years and the oldest of them all is found in Genesis 5:27: So 
all the days of Me·thu´se·lah amounted to nine hundred and sixty-nine years 
and he died.

Many dispelled the Bible's facts as myth at the time but if we accept the 
Bible as fact, we will not be easily lied to by the 'system of things'.
Also discussed before was the fact that when Adam and Eve were thrown out 
of the Garden, they were forced to eat bread for the rest of time and get 
sick and die. This corresponds with the introduction of the cultivation of 
grains (website below) and thus the introduction of disease and death.

(Genesis 3:17-19) 17 And to Adam he said: “Because you listened to your 
wife’s voice and took to eating from the tree concerning which I gave you 
this command, ‘You must not eat from it,’ cursed is the ground on your 
account. In pain you will eat its produce all the days of your life. 18 And 
thorns and thistles it will grow for you, and you must eat the vegetation 
of the field. 19 In the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you 
return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For dust you are and to 
dust you will return.”

>  The problem was that the
>paleoanthropologists had assumed that elderly people would have
>deteriorated bones, as modern humans do, but this assumption was
>unwarranted.  I wish I could find the reference...

There was an article that mentioned that grain producing areas such as 
Egypt had large populations of people with osteoporosis and brain diseases 
as shown by their mummified remains and remains of those in areas that did 
not grow grains, like some Andean countries, had no degeneration.
Here is a good article but not the one I was looking for:
http://www.celiac.com/cgi-bin/webc.cgi/st_prod.html?p_prodid=78

Paleobest,
Susan