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]

[continued]

The policy implications are surely to target health policy at a particular section of the total population, Black and White, not the working population but the welfare-embedded population. The working population is doing fine. Then health professionals, i.e the genuine and competent ones, might get somewhere, instead of - as Polpak alludes to - one Indigenous population parasiting off another for their cushy life-time jobs, while the target population wallows in its poor health and parasites, for life, off the rest of Australia.

Discuss.

Well, Loudmouth the paper you linked to indicates the difference between traditional hunter gatherer societies and acculturated societies is not very much and mostly at the young end. The reduction in probability is 3-fold at most. There is almost no difference between acculturated societies and Sweden in 1900 in terms of death risk at any age. I doubt there was much welfare oriented behaviour in Sweden in 1900.

So I think your hypothesis needs some modification.

Well, no, Agromonist, it's just that relatively low life expectancy is, for very different reasons, relatively common to both 'acculturated hunter-gatherers' and peasant societies.

In other words, relatively similar outcomes, from very different causes.

I stress 'relatively' because I suspect that most peasant societies have a statistically better health profile (but perhaps a worse disease and infant-mortality profile) than 'acculturated hunter-gatherers' or anybody living in conditions of lousy diet, no employment, no exercise, low-opportunity and low-interest-in-opportunity - what Oscar Lewis, the Marxist anthropologist, called a 'culture of poverty' and what I would call a welfare-oriented population.

Lewis posited that socialism or a strong welfare system, might help people get up and out of a 'culture of poverty' but I'm not so sure, it seems to work the other way around. So he might have got that wrong, and I think he was realising that towards the end of his short life, working in 'socialist' Cuba in the late sixties.

But let's not forget that only about a third of the Australian Indigenous population - maybe half at a pinch - is living in this way. The scandal is that so many Indigenous professionals, on good salaries, are wasting their careers maintaining the welfare system as it is, in a devil's bargain in which the welfare-oriented clientele pretend to be trying to do something, while the professionals pretend that it is all about to work, just around the corner.

And nothing changes, or improves. Check out how many Indigenous health organisations there are, hundreds if not thousands across Australia, and the health of the 'acculturated hunter-gatherers' improves not one bit, year after year. Scandalous.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Indigenous population gets on with business. Thirty thousand university graduates by the end of this year.

Joe

I don’t know, Loudmouth. You suspect a lot, but the data you pointed to suggests the opposite. It has curves for probability of death at each age. Those for acculturated hunter-gather societies and for Sweden in 1900 are virtually identical. So, it is probably unlikely aboriginal people have a worse infant mortality profile than inhabitants of Sweden in 1900.

If you want to put forward a different hypothesis to the one in the paper you linked to, you will need some other data. Random pontifications based on your prejudices won’t cut it. So where is this data that shows any of your thoughts have merit?

Well, Sweden in 1800, not 1900, for one thing, Agrominist. That's the problem with logarithmic scales as in 1 (B) which you seem to be going on, they can give the impression of roughly similar rates. Check them again, and have a good look at Fig. 2.

The grim reality has been that, life is very hard and usually short in hunter-gatherer societies, and has not been a bed of roses for 'acculturated hunter-gatherers' either. Peasant societies, such as Sweden up to 1900, and Japan until much later, have provided more reliable food supplies than hunter-gatherer societies could - that's no fault of theirs - but still had much more primitive disease prevention mechanisms in 1900 than were available to us fifty and a hundred years later.

The upshot is that public health measures, and advances in medical remediation have been phenomenal over the past century, and that life expectancy has risen from, say, 35-40-odd in hunter-gatherer societeies, to 47-50 in peasant societies and early industrial societies in 1840 or 1850, to 80-85 in highly industrialised societies today. As well, working life has become much less physical, less life-threatening.

One could extrapolate from the article and suggest that life expectancy improved by about one month every 10,000 years in our common ancestral hunter-gatherer societies, by perhaps one year in every thousand years in agricultural society, and - as the article asserts - by around three months for every year in industrial society, since 1840. "Stunningly linear".

In amongst all that, the life expectancy for 'acculturated hunter-gatherers', i.e. ex-hunter-gatherers, has improved slightly to roughly approximate the rates attained in peasant societies. And there it has tended to stay. At least, current Indigenous health findings suggest that to be the case. Do you dispute any of this ?

Cheers,

Joe

The ABS has just published data on non-school qualifications at the 2011 Census. It counted more than 29,400 Indigenous people with university-level qualifications (i.e. more or less as at the end of 2010), ten thousand more than at the 2006 Census.

The total DEEWR figures for the period 2006-2010 were far lower, with barely six thousand new Indigenous under-graduates recorded, so the ABS figures - self-reporting rather than relying on univeries' print-outs - are up to fifty per cent higher than the DEEWR figures.

In 2011 itself, according to DEEWR, 1742 Indigenous people graduated. Taking those figures at face-value, and assuming that the graduate numbers for 2012 will be similar, then by the end of this year, close to thirty three thousand Indigenous people will have university qualifications.

If we go back to 1975, less than forty years ago, the number of Indigenous tertiary graduates was barely one hundred. What made the difference ? Moving to, and growing up in, cities certainly helped, but the more immediate cause, I strongly believe, was the institution of support programs, to prepare Indigenous students for enrolment in mainstream programs of study and providing social and academic support throughout their study. Without those programs, I suggest that the total number of graduates could still be well under ten thousand.

Thirty three thousand graduates: to put that in perspective, there are around 280,000 Indigenous adults over 22. So one in every 8.5 Indigenous adults is a university graduate.

Women graduates outnumber men two-to-one, so one in six or seven Indigenous women is a graduate.

Urban populations are far more likely to contain graduates, so perhaps one in five urban Indigenous women is a university graduate.

By the way, those Indigenous women graduates are far more likely to marry non-Indigenous colleagues and work-mates, perhaps 90 %.

And since Indigenous communities are too incapacitated and disinclined to make any effort to attract Indigenous graduates, male or female, except in Health or SocialWork, those women are likely to remain in the cities - after all, most of them these days were born and raised there.

Love Censuses !

If I had stayed in New Guinea, on an island plantation, only 50 nautical miles from a major centre, it is unlikely I would have survived my first heart attack.

So for me that means civilisation has added at least 16.6% to my life expectancy.