Surprising Facts About Otzi the Iceman
news.nationalgeographic.com
news.nationalgeographic.com
Stuff like this makes me wonder how much of current health scares about modern diets (HFCS, glutton, carbs, dairy, GMOs, bad food of the month) should be taken seriously. The narrative presented is often that our bodies aren't suited to modern diets and people used to be a lot more healthy. It's too bad we don't have more long dead guys to fill the research gap.
>he had alarming levels of arsenic in his system (probably due to working with metal ores and copper extraction)
Also, the argument here that "since he wasn't eating a modern diet and still had health problems, we can't blame health problems on our modern diet" is somewhat silly. Diets like paleo are clearly against grains, which Otzi definitely ate (for all we know, that was most of his diet [1]... this guy was alive long after the advent of agriculture).
Paleo (and similar diet) proponents would tell you that the cause of his gallstones and bad teeth were a high grain diet. To be clear, I'm not arguing that those claims are accurate, only that the logic in the OP doesn't directly counter such claims.
Furthermore, the short life expectancy argument already being trotted out in this thread is pure bull. Life expectancy, which was mainly low due to infant mortality, dropped when agriculture was introduced and didn't recover until last century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy...
[1] http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2012/04/lessons-from-o...
Another easy to research example, we know from historic records that life expectancy in 19th century Ireland was near the top of the table you provided in WP, but was considered quite low for the time period in Western Europe. Other data shows that by 1900 U.S. life expectancy was already ~50 which is almost double the figure provided by EB.
Another way to think about it is, unless humans rapidly developed an ability to handle grains in the last couple hundred years, life expectancy should still be at or around historic numbers, not at around double. People should still be dropping dead from diets of grains, but they don't. So an external causal agent other than grains (livestock domestication, introduction of alcohol, large scale warfare, highly virulent diseases) must be the logical conclusion.
The figures are off for Classical Rome as well. Depending on your social class life expectancy was around 40 for the lower classes and around 60 for the upper classes. Other studies show that if a child made it through their first 5 years, they could be expected to live to around 50 regardless of social class. It wasn't considered unusual to see people in their 60s and even early 70s even if the percentage of population in those ages was much smaller than today. But of course documentation isn't very good either leading to those conflicting figures.
Another case, Australia spent about 30 years trying to get the life expectancy of Aboriginals up to any kind of reasonable number. I believe the gap when they started studying it was about 20 years. Grains were not causing non-Aboriginals to drop dead before their Aboriginal hunter gatherer neighbors.
I'm generally suspicious of any expectancy tables for any population that don't start at around 35-40 for any time period. Numbers lower than that are almost always the cause of a catastrophic external factor like the Black Death. There are pitifully few well documented populations where life expectancy isn't at least in the 40s. This goes for hunter gatherer tribes to the most war-torn inhospitable genocide suffering places on the planet with access to virtually no healthcare and unbelievable infant mortality rates but plenty of grains.
The introduction of a staple bearing diet had little effect on life expectancy numbers directly, but enabled other advances which did.
Again, I wasn't trying to argue for this, but I wouldn't discount diet as a factor completely. I've heard it suggested that some of the first agricultural societies were extremely malnourished because they depended too heavily on grains. Obviously, they didn't have fortified foods or supermarkets like we do today. I don't see why an extreme malnutrition (in vitamins/minerals, not calories) couldn't be a factor.
The problem I have is that grains are pointed to be alternative diet folks as some kind great evil by itself based on dubious claims around unsubstantiated reasoning. Like I said, some external factor is more likely the issue.
http://www.grandchallenges.org/ImproveNutrition/Challenges/N...
He was a farmer. Agriculture was widespread in southern Europe in 3300 BC. One of his last meals included highly processed grains.
It's true we eat a lot of processed crap today, but if you read about a diet and see any claims that people used to be a lot more healthy you can probably ignore the rest. The paleo diet for instance, which is big nowadays, isn't based on any knowledge about what humans actually ate during the paleolithic [1]. What people forget is that the lifespan of the average human used to be much shorter, and our ancestors just had to live long enough to have offspring instead of living healthy long lives for us to be here today.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...
An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why" gives more of the background.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...
His claim is what I've always understood too, admittedly without questioning it. But in my university studies of art history, it is common to read about Renaissance masters in their 60s and 70s. It's so common that no contemporaneous authors remark on it, which I imagine they would do otherwise.
[1] http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2...
Looking at the plot associated with your quote emphasizes the difference.
A new nuclear reactor was built near town. Not long after, residents began complaining of headaches, nausea, trouble sleeping, tiredness, and a host of other issues.
The lead engineer on the project commented with a grin: "You think that's something, just wait 'til this baby's operational!"
For us hackers and compsci people who are used to thinking about the rates of growth and binary trees, it shouldn't be surprising that the most recent common ancestor of all humans has been estimated to have lived less than 10k years ago. Wikipedia has a nice article on it -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor
Mitochondrial Eve lived 140 to 200 kya (kya = 1,000 years ago). Y-chromosomal Adam lived perhaps 388 kya.
Edit: I guess you are looking at common ancestor, not a bottleneck. Reading the page more I find that everyone has a common ancestor around 3000 BC or so. But that common ancestor probably wouldn't be the guy frozen in the ice. But I'm betting the Sentinelese people would mess up those estimates.
This is a case where the objection to the argument presented in the article is so obvious to me I feel like I'm missing something. (wouldn't be the first time!) It almost sounds like they wrote a computer program that was seriously abstracted and when run it spit out "3000 BP" and now "they" are interpreting that result literally.
See the "MRCA of all living humans" section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor#TMR...
Nit: charcoal was probably rubbed into incisions, not lacerations. Tearing flesh instead of using a sharp instrument is probably too hard-core, even for Otzi.
Also, if tearing the flesh and rubbing charcoal in isn't how acupuncture is done, my aromatherapist is about to receive a VERY sternly worded email.