You think Bill Cosby paid for the research?
Though Mudbone said it best: "You don't get to be old by being no fool."
Old People May Hold Key to Human Success -Study
Tue Jul 6, 2004 05:11 AM ET
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Old people may hold the key to human civilization, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
They found evidence that, around 30,000 years ago, many more people started living into old age, in turn fueling a population explosion.
Rachel Caspari of the University of Michigan and Sang-Hee Lee of the University of California at Riverside believe that groups in which old people survived better were more successful, in turn allowing more people to live into old age.
"There has been a lot of speculation about what gave modern humans their evolutionary advantage. This research provides a simple explanation for which there is now concrete evidence -- modern humans were older and wiser," Caspari said.
"We think with increases in longevity two things happened to increase survivorship," Caspari, an anthropologist specializing in evolution, added in a telephone interview.
"First, individual people have more kids because if you live longer you can continue to have kids after your kids have kids. And second, you can contribute to your extended family and increase the survival of your progeny. This can increase population size, and it can happen quite quickly."
The finding, published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, supports the so-called "grandma hypothesis," Caspari said.
This credits grandmothers with helping to raise their extended families, contributing to a group's success.
Caspari and Lee studied 768 different human fossils, including examples of Cro-Magnon, which are early Homo
