Category Archives: Human Longevity

The Greatest Threat to Retirement Savings is Human Longevity
http://www.brokersalliance.com Steve talks about the impact of the mortality revolution and it result in baby boomers running out of money. Steve Savant is host of the Business Insurance Zone and national insurance columnist.From:BrokersAllianceViews:46 0ratingsTime:04:32More inEducation

See the original post here:
The Greatest Threat to Retirement Savings is Human Longevity - Video

swissnex Connector Award- Meet Prof Joe Brain
swissnex Connector Award (SCA) is a two-month long campaign that highlights swissnex success stories, rewards our community and shares personal views on Switzerland #39;s innovation nation. Meet Professor Joe Brain. Professor Brain is the Cecil K. and Philip Drinker Professor of Environmental Physiology in the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard School of Public Health. Professor Brain was instrumental in the organization of our speaker series with SwissRe on "The Future of Human Longevity."From:swissnexbostonViews:23 0ratingsTime:03:32More inNonprofits Activism

See the rest here:
swissnex Connector Award- Meet Prof Joe Brain - Video

Castration May Lead to Longer Life for Men
A new study has found that castrated men mdash;specifically, eunuchs mdash;seem to outlive other men by nearly two decades. The Chosun Dynasty, which ruled Korea from 1392 to 1897, kept records of 81 eunuchs #39; lives and found their average lifespan to be about 70 years. Compared to other men from the time of similar social rank, researchers found the eunuchs tended to outlive their counterparts by 14 to 19 years. They noted that three of the 81 even lived past 100 years old. While the study does not prove that castration directly increases human longevity, it does support previous research that male sex hormones may have an adverse effect on the immune system.From:slatesterViews:2395 10ratingsTime:00:44More inScience Technology

Read more:
Castration May Lead to Longer Life for Men - Video

ScienceDaily (Oct. 23, 2012) Computer simulations provide new mathematical support for the "grandmother hypothesis" -- a famous theory that humans evolved longer adult lifespans than apes because grandmothers helped feed their grandchildren.

"Grandmothering was the initial step toward making us who we are," says Kristen Hawkes, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah and senior author of the new study published Oct. 24 by the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The simulations indicate that with only a little bit of grandmothering -- and without any assumptions about human brain size -- animals with chimpanzee lifespans evolve in less than 60,000 years so they have a human lifespan. Female chimps rarely live past child-bearing years, usually into their 30s and sometimes their 40s. Human females often live decades past their child-bearing years.

The findings showed that from the time adulthood is reached, the simulated creatures lived another 25 years like chimps, yet after 24,000 to 60,000 years of grandmothers caring for grandchildren, the creatures who reached adulthood lived another 49 years -- as do human hunter-gatherers.

The grandmother hypothesis says that when grandmothers help feed their grandchildren after weaning, their daughters can produce more children at shorter intervals; the children become younger at weaning but older when they first can feed themselves and when they reach adulthood; and women end up with postmenopausal lifespans just like ours.

By allowing their daughters to have more children, a few ancestral females who lived long enough to become grandmothers passed their longevity genes to more descendants, who had longer adult lifespans as a result.

Hawkes conducted the new study with first author and mathematical biologist Peter Kim, a former University of Utah postdoctoral researcher now on the University of Sydney faculty, and James Coxworth, a University of Utah doctoral student in anthropology. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Australian Research Council.

How Grandmothering Came to Be

Hawkes, University of Utah anthropologist James O'Connell and UCLA anthropologist Nicholas Blurton Jones formally proposed the grandmother hypothesis in 1997, and it has been debated ever since. Once major criticism was that it lacked a mathematical underpinning -- something the new study sought to provide.

The hypothesis stemmed from observations by Hawkes and O'Connell in the 1980s when they lived with Tanzania's Hazda hunter-gatherer people and watched older women spend their days collecting tubers and other foods for their grandchildren. Except for humans, all other primates and mammals collect their own food after weaning.

Read the original here:
Grandmas made humans live longer: Chimp lifespan evolves into human longevity, computer simulation shows

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Our grandmothers being there to care of us is something we all take for granted, and we have our ancestors to thank for that. New research indicates that human longevity is what it is because of grandmothers helping with childcare at an early stage in human history. Computer simulations on evolution have helped scientists prove that humans evolved longer life spans than apes because of their grandmotherly duties.

When it comes to chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, females rarely live beyond their 30s, usually when their fertility usually ends. Although, based on the computer data, these female primates could evolve to extend their lifespan to those on par with human levels within 60,000 years if they took on a more grandmotherly role.

Previously, anthropologists have been divided as to whether humans long lives were due to the grandmother hypothesis or the hunting hypothesis. The computer simulations now show a stronger tie to the grandmother hypothesis.

Grandmothering was the initial step toward making us who we are, said Kristen Hawkes, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah and senior author of the new study published in todays issue of the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

In the computer experiments, simulated creatures, generally lived another 25 years after reaching adulthood, much like chimps. But after 24,000 to 60,000 years of grandmothering duties, the simulated creatures lived another 49 years, on par with human hunter-gatherers.

The grandmother hypothesis states that when grandmothers help feed their grandchildren after weaning, their daughters can produce more children at shorter intervals. This theory also indicates that children becoming younger at weaning but older when they can first feed themselves and when they reach adulthood. The hypothesis also indicates that women who take on grandmotherly duties also end up with lifespans that go well beyond menopause.

Furthermore, by allowing their daughter to have more children, ancestral females who lived long enough to become grandmothers passed their longevity genes on to their descendants, who had longer lifespans as a result.

Another suggestion, based on the simulations, is that grandmothers may have even been responsible for increasing humans brain size by allowing mother to have larger families, increasing the pressure of natural selection. Bigger brains made early humans more capable of learning better hunting techniques and clever use of hunting weapons. The increased brain size in our ape-like ancestors was the major factor in humans developing lifespans longer than apes.

Hawkes conducted her study with the aid of mathematical biologist Peter Kim, a former University of Utah postdoctoral researcher now with University of Sydney, and also James Coxworth, a University of Utah doctoral student in anthropology.

See the original post here:
Humans Evolved To Live Longer Because Of Grandmothers

By: Rebecca Jacobson

Photo by Susan Smith via Flickr.

Humans may have developed our long life spans as a result of nature's first babysitters: grandmothers. A new study published in the Proceedings of Royal Society B on Wednesday uses a mathematical model to determine how grandmothers can influence human longevity over the course of several generations, giving humans longer life spans than other primates.

This model revives a popular but often contested theory of human evolution known as the "grandmother hypothesis," which was first proposed in 1998 by Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah and senior author of Wednesday's study, and her colleague James O'Connell. The idea is that if grandmothers help feed and care for their grandchildren, mothers have more time and resources to devote to having another baby. And the more grandchildren she has, the greater chance grandma has of passing on the genes that allowed to her to live to such an old age, Hawkes said. This would also help explain why humans live long past their fertile years, something that is unique compared to other primates.

Hawkes thinks this new social cooperation and shifting life expectancy may have been the key to the evolution of humans from their australopithecine ancestors about four million years ago. And by caring for children other than their own, grandmothers may be the reason we became hyper-social, Hawkes said.

"So much of what makes us human may be a legacy of our ancestral grandmothers and ancestral babies," Hawkes said. "Just the pressure that it puts on babies to be better at engaging their caretakers...if it started with grandmothering, then it carried along a bunch of other things that we need to explain our life history."

Hawkes' theory has been embraced by some anthropologists, but others claim that changes in diet, hunting or human brain size had a greater role to play in shaping our modern selves. One of the criticisms was the theory lacked mathematical evidence that grandmothers alone could influence human longevity. Studies in 2010 and 2011 from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology concluded that there were not enough women living past menopause to affect the life span of their descendants.

To challenge that finding, lead author and mathematical biologist Peter Kim at the University of Sydney created a mathematical model to simulate how long it would take to change the life span from one similar to our great ape ancestors to present hunter-gatherer groups. He adjusted the simulation to make grandmothers at least 45 years old and less than 1 percent of the female adult population. The model also stipulated that grandmothers could care for any children 2 years or older, not just her daughters' children.

Hawkes said the study did not include other factors such as brain size, hunting or pair bonding to show only the effect of grandmothering. In less than 60,000 years, human life expectancy doubled and the number of grandmothers in the population rose to more than 40 percent, similar to hunter-gatherer societies, Hawkes said.

The rest is here:
How Grandmothers Gave Us Longer Lives

Computer simulation shows how with a little grandmothering animals with chimpanzee lifespans can develop human lifespans in 60,000 years Grandmothers would have helped to dig up tubers and crack nuts while younger adults got on with childrearing and hunting

By Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED: 17:26 EST, 23 October 2012 | UPDATED: 17:26 EST, 23 October 2012

Human longevity is all thanks to our grandmothers' efforts to care for their family, new research suggests.

A theory that humans evolved longer adult lifespans than apes because grandmothers helped feed their grandchildren has been proved by a computer simulation of evolution, scientists claim.

Until now anthropologists were divided as to whether humans long lives were down to the 'grandmother hypothesis' or 'hunting hypothesis.'

Crucial to our evolution: Grandmothers who lived on to help with feeding their daughters offspring helped to pass on the longevity gene to future generations, scientists now believe

The grandmother hypothesis says that when grandmothers help feed their grandchildren after weaning, their daughters can produce more children at shorter intervals.

Because more children are born a few ancestral females who lived long enough to become grandmothers passed their longevity genes to more descendants, who had longer adult lifespans as a result.

See more here:
Thanks grandma! Human longevity 'down to older females who carried on caring for their offspring's young families'

Charles Q. Choi

The death rate in industrialized countries has dropped so much in the last century or so that, for example, a 72-year-old in Japan has the same chances of dying as a preindustrial 30-year-old did, or does, a new study says.

"In other words," the researchers write, " ... 72 is the new 30."

Humans nowadays survive much longer than our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, which rarely live past 50. Even hunter-gathererswho often lack the advanced nutrition, modern medicine, and other benefits of industrialized livinghave twice the life expectancy at birth as wild chimpanzees.

So what's changed in us since the days of our ape ancestors? Are we living so much longer mainly because of changes in our lifestyles or because of genetic mutationsin other words, evolution?

(Related: "Longevity Genes Found; Predict Chances of Reaching a Hundred.")

To find out how we got to this advanced state, the study team compared death rates in industrialized countries with those in modern-day hunter-gatherer groups, whose lifestyles more closely mirror those of early modern humans.

The researchers found that the mortality rate at younger agesduring the first couple decades of lifein the industrialized world is now about 200 times lower overall than in today's hunter-gatherer groups.

"We have a greater distance in mortality levels between today's lowest-mortality nations and hunter-gatherers than there is between hunter-gatherers and chimpanzees," said study leader Oskar Burger, an evolutionary anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany.

Longevity's Great Leap Forward

The rest is here:
"Seventy-two Is the New 30": Why Are We Living So Much Longer?

LOS ANGELES (MCT) Modern humans have gotten incomparably good at survival, doing more to extend our lives over the past century than our forebears did in the previous 6.6 million years since we parted evolutionary ways with chimpanzees, according to a new study.

In fact, humans in societies with plentiful food and advanced medicine have surpassed other species used in life-extending medical research in stretching our longevity and reducing our odds of dying at every point along our ever-lengthening lifespans, the study finds.

The research, published online Monday by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, touches upon the hotly debated question of whether an upper limit to longevity is inscribed in our genes. It makes clear that life extension begins at birth, with a child born in the last four generations standing a better chance of being alive during infancy, adolescence, the reproductive years and after than in any of the 8,000 human generations that came before.

The study authors, from Germanys Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, began by comparing people who have lived or now live in primitive hunter-gatherer societies around the globe in which lifespans have been well documented to citizens of industrialized countries in Europe and Asia. A typical Swede, for instance, is more than 100 times more likely to survive to the age 15 than a typical hunter-gatherer. And a hunter-gatherer who has reached the ripe old age of 30 is about as likely to die in the following year as the worlds champion of longevity a 72-year-old woman in Japan.

In evolutions actuarial table, the researchers wrote, 72 is the new 30.

The bulk of that progress has been made since 1800, when the average lifespan of a Swede at birth was 32. That is roughly on a par with the 31 years that the average hunter-gatherer can expect to live.

By the year 1900, the average lifespan in Sweden had reached 52, and today it stands at 82 an increase of more than 150 percent in just over 200 years.

That puts to shame efforts to extend the lives of laboratory animals, the study authors noted. By inducing genetic mutations in various species, scientists have boosted the longevity of nematode worms by more than 100 percent, of fruit flies by about 85 percent and of mice by roughly 50 percent. Experiments in caloric restriction have also extended the lives of lab animals, but they also fall short of humans real-world gains.

No species dramatizes the breathtaking rate of humans life extension more than chimpanzees, mankinds closest relative. At any age, the life expectancy of a human in a hunter-gatherer society is closer to that of a chimp in the wild than it is to a modern-day resident of Japan or Sweden, according to the study.

The authors wrote that the rapid improvements in human survival could only be accounted for by environmental changes, including better nutrition and medical advances; changes in the genome accumulate far too slowly to explain the progress.

Continued here:
New research examines modern humans’ ability to extend lifespan

Modern humans have gotten incomparably good at survival, doing more to extend our lives over the last century than our forebears did in the previous 6.6 million years since we parted evolutionary ways with chimpanzees, according to a new study.

In fact, humans in societies with plentiful food and advanced medicine have surpassed other species used in life-extending medical research in stretching our longevity and reducing our odds of dying at every point along our ever-lengthening life spans, the study finds.

The research, published online Monday by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, touches upon the hotly debated question of whether an upper limit to longevity is inscribed in our genes. It makes clear that life extension begins at birth, with a child born in the last four generations standing a better chance of being alive during infancy, adolescence, the reproductive years and after than in any of the 8,000 human generations that came before.

The study authors, from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, began by comparing people who have lived or now live in primitive hunter-gatherer societies around the globe in which life spans have been well documented with citizens of industrialized countries in Europe and Asia. A typical Swede, for instance, is more than 100 times more likely to survive to the age 15 than a typical hunter-gatherer. And a hunter-gatherer who has reached the ripe old age of 30 is about as likely to die in the following year as the world's champion of longevity a 72-year-old woman in Japan.

In evolution's actuarial table, the researchers wrote, "72 is the new 30."

The bulk of that progress has been made since 1800, when the average life span of a Swede at birth was 32. That is roughly on a par with the 31 years that the average hunter-gatherer can expect to live today.

By the year 1900, the average life span in Sweden had reached 52, and today it stands at 82 an increase of more than 150% in just over 200 years.

That puts to shame efforts to extend the lives of laboratory animals, the study authors noted. By inducing genetic mutations in various species, scientists have boosted the longevity of nematode worms by more than 100%, of fruit flies by about 85% and of mice by roughly 50%. Experiments in caloric restriction have also extended the lives of lab animals, but they also fall short of humans' real-world gains.

No species dramatizes the breathtaking rate of humans' life extension more than chimpanzees, mankind's closest relative. At any age, the life expectancy of a human in a hunter-gatherer society is closer to that of a chimp in the wild than it is to a modern-day resident of Japan or Sweden, according to the study.

The authors wrote that the rapid improvements in human survival could only be accounted for by environmental changes, including better nutrition and medical advances; changes in the genome accumulate far too slowly to explain the progress.

Read more:
Modern humans found to be fittest ever at survival, by far