| Even if there is a 0% infant mortality rate, if everybody dies around 30, the average life expectancy can still be 30. Like I said, this is easy to test, there are still quite a few hunter gatherer cultures around, and they aren't exactly struggling to deal with an elderly care problem. This is pretty well studied. What you are supplying is conjecture, or perhaps an interesting hypothesis. "I think it's closer to the truth to say that cavemen...lived a natural lifespan closer to modern man." Test it! I honestly don't know the answer, the data I managed to find in 10 minutes of searching says that hypothesis is incorrect -- but as you rightly point out my data includes infant mortality in the averages (I believe). But if you can find data that says "excluding infant mortality, pre-agrarian cultures have an average lifespan of 70-80 years" I'll be more than happy to accept that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy According to the entry above, there's a measure called e5 that should supply the relevant figures. And I think it's a straw man to say that accepting a "caveman" or "hunter gatherer" diet means we need to accept -every- aspect of "primitive" life. I'm not really attacking the diet per se, many of the recipes are actually pretty tasty and are generally pretty healthy. I'm attacking the faulty line of reasoning given as to why one should do this. "it seems to be pretty healthy" is wishy washy, but okay "You should eat this way because evolution made you to eat this way therefore it's healthy" is not, it present a long chain of reasoning that falls apart at almost every link, but it's presented as a kind of science, which it's not by this reasoning. |