I’ve just come across this fascinating article

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/10/10/1215627109.full.pdf

titled “Human mortality improvement in evolutionary context”
which analyses the results of a multitude of studies of life expectancy, mortality rates and probablility of death at various ages, in different societies through history.

The study looks at (alphabetically) what they term acculturated hunter-gatherers; France, Japan and Sweden from 1750 to 2010; hunter-gatherer societies; and – as a rough guide to similar rates amongst non-human primates - wild chimpanzees.

They report ‘a stunningly linear pattern between 1840 and the present’ in highly industrialised countries, in which life expectancy has increased by an amazing three months for every year since then, i.e. more than forty years: our life expectancy has increased by around thirty years since 1890, in other words.

As well, they were surprised to find that mortality rates and life expectancy amongst hunter-gatherers is much closer to those of wild chimpanzees than to modern industrialised societies, but not much worse than those of peasant societies such as Japan’s and Sweden’s barely one hundred years ago.

In real terms, they point out that ‘up until age 15 …. Hunter-gatherers experience death rates 100-fold higher than today’s rates’ in industrialised societies: a hunter-gatherer had a similar likelihood to be dead by 30 as a modern Japanese at 72.

Life-expectancy of ‘acculturated’ hunter-gatherers (the article cites ‘Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory’ as an example) – what may as likely be called ‘the under-class’, or ‘the welfare-encapsulated’ population - has been slightly better than for hunter-gatherers overall, but has not improved noticeably over the past couple of hundred years, which has serious implications for health policy. One suspects that the life-expectancy and mortality rates of professional Indigenous people is quite different, and share much more with those of industrialised societies, or the middle class of those societies.

In sum, as they point out, the vast bulk of mortality reduction has occurred in the last one hundred years, the last four generations out of an estimated eight thousand generations of humanity. We're the lucky generations !

So, peasants lived shorter lives after 1740. That's because their lives were increasingly nasty, brutish and cold... . In the tens of thousands of years before that, I think it was very different. OK, life was hard, infections from accidents could be fatal, but hunter gatherers were not peasants, they were free men and women and according to anthropologists who've studied human remains for the first 200,000 years of human existence, they were surprisingly healthy, well organised, lived wisely, taking care of each other and their environment, and frequently lived to a reasonable age.

This is a flawed study, I'd suggest. If humans are living longer, so what? Most now exist in cramped ghettoes of vast megalopolises, never seeing clean air, water, soil or uncontaminated food. I think I'd rather have a short life as a prehistoric hunter gatherer than be born in a slum of somewhere like Karachi, Jakarta, Bombay, Shanghai....

Feel free, ygripbp, there's plenty of open country out there, where you can put into practice what you claim to prefer.

So when somebody does research that comes up with something you disagree with, then it must be 'flawed' ? Therefore you can feel free to write any rubbish you like ? Do you work in Ab Studies, by any chance ?

Dig deeper, ybgirpbg, you may learn something that will surprise you, that may rock your empty assumptions. Good luck.

Joe

Yes statistical life-expectancy and mortality rates for professional "Indigenous" people are quite different, this seen all around world when consider groups over-represented in fail to thrive statistics.

As education and earnings rise so do statistical living standards and survivability.

Our Taliban work hard protecting their dominance through preventing raised education, opportunity, living standards, survivability and most of all those choices otherwise available to individuals.

Largest barrier to achievement remains government, Taliban and fellow travelers, protecting their barriers which deny our underclass from opportunities otherwise available to them

Acculturated hunter gatherer societies do slightly better than ancient hunter gatherer societies and 19th century slaves in Trinidad. But life expectancy is nowhere near that of modern developed countries. Why is easy to determine. The authors of the article make the point

"Human mortality increase has been largely achieved by removing environmental shocks, by making injuries and illnesses less fatal with medical technology, and by enhancing health at older ages by improving nutrition and reducing disease at younger ages"

Such advances have failed dismally with acculturated hunter gatherer societies. It is hard to deliver improved medical technology to nomadic societies in remote and difficult to get to regions. Particularly, when rapid action is often important. Equally, it is difficult to improve nutrition to these societies where they are more prone to environmental factors reducing their food availability and the season availability of foods with high nutrient content.

Hi Agronomist,

Quite an ironic name - I tried on a couple of Aboriginal communities to get vegetable gardens going, to no avail. Yes, I got one going and people were very happy to pick all the peas, or tomatoes, or whatever. Talk about the Little Black Hen.

But I do think we have to - certainly these days - differentiate, or disaggregate the Indigenous population, in every field, including health, diet, exercise &c - I would hazard a guess that people in remote communities would still have longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality than people did in pre-contact, 'traditional' societies. After all, one thing - at least down here in SA - that the Protector tried to do was to provide a range of supplies for (as they termed it) 'the old, the sick & infirm', and thereby probably extended those people's lives far more than would have been the case.

Sorry, ybgirp, there wasn't much of a welfare system in traditional hunter-gatherer societies, here, or in Scotland, or in Africa, or anywhere. Probably, even in remote communities, Aboriginal people have never lived longer than they do now - or had a lower infant mortality rate.

And, Agronomist, when we disaggregate the Indigenous population into welfare-oriented, trade-oriented and professional-work-oriented population - basically its rapidly-developing class structure - it is clear that the two-thirds or so of working population have a drastically different health profile, and life expectancy, from the welfare-oriented population - they are far less likely to spend their waking hours on the grog, or in a drug-haze, and are far, far less likely to be beating up or killing their beloveds.

Here's a wild guess for health policy-makers to think about:

* Indigenous professionals have similar health profiles, and life expectancy, as working white professionals;

* welfare-oriented Indigenous people, in remote settlements, in rural towns and in outer suburbs, have similar health profiles to other people in similar situations of non-work and avoidance of opportunity.

[TBC]