Why Do Humans Live So Long – There may not be a limit to how long people can live — and if there is, experts say we’re nowhere near it.
Life expectancy is relatively easy to calculate — it’s about 76 years in the U.S. — but the longest life expectancy, if it exists, is much harder to estimate, experts say.
Why Do Humans Live So Long
If there is, we don’t go near it. That’s the claim by researchers from the University of Georgia and the University of South Florida in a study published this week in the journal
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Professors David McCarthy and Po-Lin Wang looked at current and historical mortality data for people aged 50 to 100 from 19 industrialized countries, including the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Japan and New Zealand.
They found occasional birth cohorts that lived longer, with the cohort born between 1900 and 1950 serving as an important example. The members “are experiencing a delay in mortality unprecedented in history, but they are still too young to break longevity records,” McCarthy and Wang wrote. As the group ages, longevity records could “significantly increase”, they warned. They aren’t sure why, but speculate that improvements in public health and medical technology may play a role.
“If there is an upper limit to human lifespan, we are not yet approaching it,” they concluded, citing the tendency of the 1900-1950 cohort to slow down life expectancy.
However, not every birth cohort experienced such longevity. Therefore, human life expectancy has generally been increasing slowly in recent years.
Does The Human Lifespan Have A Limit?
The ancient Hebrews considered 80 to be the maximum length of human life, while the ancient Romans considered 100 or 110 to be the limit. The record for the longest recorded human lifespan is held by Jeanna Calment, a French woman who lived for 122 years. When she was born in 1875, the average life expectancy was only about 40 years.
Life expectancy is relatively easy to calculate – it’s about 76 years in the US – but the longest life expectancy, if any, is much harder to estimate. While some researchers argue that the natural limit is around 120, 140 or 150 years, others speculate that there is no limit – and that aging does not necessarily lead to death.
“Evolutionary biology lends little support to the idea that there are ‘aging genes’ that simply cause their carrier to grow old and die,” wrote Richard Fargher, a professor of biogerontology at the University of Brighton in the UK, in 2016. A conversation
“Aging is simply an exponential increase in your chance of death and disease over time.”
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Some members of a population, Fargher argues, tend to survive these problems—perhaps through evolutionary fitness and a little luck.
Case in point: hydras—small freshwater animals—don’t seem to age, and their chance of dying doesn’t seem to change over time, rather than increase. “Extrapolation from laboratory data suggests that even after 1,400 years, 5% of the hyda population … would still be alive,” he wrote.
As Fargher concluded, “perhaps the real lesson here is that simple closed-ended questions, in any scientific discipline, are kind of like asking, ‘Who is the most interesting person?’ – intoxicatingly deep and practically useless.”
Subscribe to Well Adjusted, our newsletter full of simple strategies for working smarter and living better from the Well team. Apply today. Humans have a natural lifespan of just 38 years – but our life expectancy has more than DOUBLE over the centuries thanks to lifestyle changes and medical advances
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Humans have a maximum natural lifespan of just 38 years, researchers say, after discovering a way to estimate how long a species lives based on its DNA.
Scientists at the Australian National Science Agency have developed a computer model of the genetic clock that they claim can accurately estimate how long different vertebrates – including living and extinct species – are likely to live.
Using the human genome, the researchers found that the longest natural lifespan for humans is 38 years, which matches anthropological estimates of lifespan for early modern humans.
They found that Neanderthals and Denisovans had a maximum lifespan of 37.8 years, similar to modern humans living around the same time.
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According to researchers, the reason that the life expectancy of a modern person is more than twice as long as this length is the progress in the standard of living and modern medicine.
Australian National Science Agency scientists have developed a DNA-based lifespan ‘clock’ which they claim can accurately estimate how long different vertebrates are expected to live
The researchers found that the maximum natural lifespan for humans is 38 years, which matches anthropological estimates of the lifespan of early modern humans
Neanderthals (pictured) and Denisovans, our early ancestors, had a maximum lifespan of 37.8 years, similar to modern humans
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“Our method for estimating the maximum natural lifespan is based on DNA,” said Dr. Mayne from the Australian government science agency CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation).
If we know the genome sequence of a species, we can estimate its lifespan. Until now, it has been difficult to estimate the lifespan of most wild animals, especially long-lived species of marine mammals and fish.’
In addition to humans and human ancestors, the researchers tested their genetic clock on the genomes of other vertebrates, both living and extinct.
They found that the bowhead whale, the longest-living mammal on Earth, can live 268 years – almost 60 years longer than previously thought.
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This information tells us that some of these arctic mammals alive today may have been born before Queen Victoria even came to the throne and around the time Captain Cook first arrived in Australia.
This would explain why a bowhead whale found by Eskimos in 2007 had part of an antique harpoon, believed to have been made in the 19th century.
The CSIRO team took the genomes of animals with known lifespans from public databases such as the NCBI Genomes and the Animal Aging and Longevity Database.
Scientists determined the lifespan of animals using a chemical process called “methylation” that turns genes on or off.
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As living things age, things go wrong, as errors creep into certain genes that can be used to determine how old an animal was when it died.
Bowhead whales can live 268 years, a study has found, meaning extant species may have existed in the ocean since before the Victorian era.
To estimate the lifespan of the extinct woolly mammoth, the researchers worked with a genome assembled from the genome of a modern African elephant that lives for 65 years.
Benjamin Mayne and his colleagues used the genomes of 252 vertebrate species with known lifespans to identify 42 genes that could help predict other lifespans.
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For example, using the genome of the African elephant and its average lifespan of 65 years as a reference, the authors used their model to estimate that both the woolly mammoth and the flat-tusked elephant have a lifespan of 60 years.
Its genome is known from the last surviving member of the species, known as ‘Lonely George’, whose death in the Galapagos Islands seven years ago led to its extinction.
It also provides a more accurate way of calculating life spans than previous methods, which involved observing how long animals live in the wild, and could help determine an animal’s risk of extinction.
“There are many genes associated with lifespan, but differences in the DNA sequences of these genes do not seem to explain differences in lifespan between different species,” said Dr. Mayne.
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Instead, we think that the density of a specific type of DNA modification, called DNA methylation, determines the maximum natural lifespan in vertebrates. DNA methylation does not change the sequence of a gene, but helps control whether and when it is turned on.
“Using the known lifespans of 262 different vertebrate species, we were able to accurately predict lifespans based on DNA methylation density occurring in 42 different genes.
“These genes are likely to be good targets for studying aging, which is of great biomedical and ecological importance,” he said.
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Dmg media Contact Us How To Complain Management Team Advertise With Us Contributors Engage With Us Terms Don’t Sell Or Share My Personal Data CA Privacy Notice About MailOnline Privacy Policy & Cookies Jeanne Calment enjoys a daily cigarette and a glass of red wine on her 117th birthday . She died in 1997 at the age of 122 and still holds the record for the longest-lived person. Credit: Jean-Pierre Fizet Getty Images
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