How does the health/longevity of late Paleolithic hunters-gatherers compare with that of the Neolithic farmers who succeeded them? Periodically one will hear it stated in online discussion forums devoted to raw foods and vegetarianism that Paleolithic peoples only lived to be 25 (or 30, or 35) years, or whatever age. (The lack of exactitude in such figures illustrates how substantiating one's "scientific facts" is not usually a very highly emphasized value in these forums.) The intended point usually being that those terribly debauched flesh-eating cavemen--and women, presumably--were not living very long due to their consumption of meat.
As is often the case with such "facts," however, if one looks at the documented sources, one sees a different picture. Here we present a summary of a classic paper on the health and longevity of late Paleolithic (pre-agricultural) and Neolithic (early agricultural) people. [Source: Angel, Lawrence J. (1984) "Health as a crucial factor in the changes from hunting to developed farming in the eastern Mediterranean." In: Cohen, Mark N.; Armelagos, George J. (eds.) (1984) Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture (proceedings of a conference held in 1982). Orlando: Academic Press. (pp. 51-73)]
Note that these figures come from studies in the field of "paleopathology" (investigation of health, disease, and death from archaeological study of skeletons) of remains in the eastern Mediterranean (defined in Angel's paper to also include Greece and western Turkey), an area where a more continuous data sample is available from ancient times. Due to the unavoidable spottiness of the archaeological record in general, however, samples from the Balkans, the Ukraine, North Africa, and Israel were included for the earliest (Paleolithic and Mesolithic) periods. While the populations in the region were not always directly descended from one another, focusing the study within the eastern Mediterranean minimizes bias in the data due to genetic change over time.
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