Aging is inevitable, but it hasn’t always looked the same throughout the long history of humankind. That’s one of the core premises behind Michael Gurven’s just-released new book, Seven Decades: How We Evolved to Live Longer.
Gurven is an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has spent much of his career studying and living alongside communities like the Tsimané of South America, indigenous groups who largely subsist off a combination of farming small crops, hunting, and gathering. Though these people have increasingly started to come into contact with the modern world, they still provide a glimpse into humanity’s past prior to widespread industrialization.
Building off his and others’ work with today’s subsistence communities, Gurven makes the compelling case that while the typical lifespan of the average person today has greatly expanded and our health has generally improved, there’s nothing particularly new about human longevity itself. Older people have always existed, even in past eras when survival was much more perilous than it is today. Moreover, he adds, there’s plenty we can learn about how best to grow older in our modern times by studying how our ancestors did it so many eons ago.
Gizmodo spoke to Gurven about his decision to not address longevity drugs, the most common misconceptions about aging, and how groups like the Tsimané might better help us better appreciate our elders. The following conversation has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.
Ed Cara, Gizmodo: I think many people who pick up a book about aging would expect to read about the breakthroughs around the corner that will supposedly and significantly prolong our lives. What made you want to focus more on the evolution of human aging?
Michael Gurven: Thanks for asking that, because I always worry that the first question I’m gonna get is exactly that: “What are the secrets? What are the hidden gems?”
Everything’s about the potential of where we can end up—the power of regenerative medicine and technology. But I wanted to actually kind of look back in order to look forward. One of the premises of the book is that longevity is not something that is so incredibly recent, but that it’s built into our DNA. It’s built into our biology. We’ve already accomplished the potential for longevity.
And because of that, I see a different type of optimism. There’s this scare over the silver tsunami and everything that goes along with the global population aging. I wanted to point out that this is not a new type of problem. It’s not that there were never old people and now all of a sudden there are tons of old people. So I wanted to give a history of understanding that we have already lived with older people as part of our population.
And I wanted to argue that rather than longevity being a consequence of our success as a species, the causal arrows may actually be in the opposite direction. That we’ve been a very successful species because of our potential for longevity.
We’ve solved problems before, and we can solve this one moving forward, but it’s not going to be a problem that’s going to be solved just with new technology and improvements in molecular medicine. There are lessons to be learned here by appreciating our natural history.
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