Sang-Hee Lee: UC Riverside Department of Anthropology

Increased longevity, expressed as number of individuals surviving to older adulthood, represents one of the ways the human life history pattern differs from other primates. We assessed changes in longevity with the ratio of older to younger adults (OY ratio) in four hominin dental samples from successive time periods, and determining the significance of differences in these ratios. While there is significant increased longevity between all groups indicating a trend of increased adult survivorship over the course of human evolution, there is a dramatic increase in longevity in the modern humans of the Early Upper Paleolithic. We then addressed whether longevity increased as a result of cultural/adaptive change in Upper Paleolithic Europe or whether it was introduced to Europe as a part of modern human biology, comparing Western Asia and European samples. We find that the Upper Paleolithic OY ratio is more than double that of the Middle Paleolithic moderns; in contrast, the OY ratios of the two West Asian Middle Paleolithic groups are not significantly different from each other. However, the OY ratios of both West Asian Moderns and Neandertals are significantly higher than the European Neandertal ratio. Considering cultural versus taxonomic differences, we conclude that the increase in adult survivorship associated with the Upper Paleolithic may reflect an important cultural adaptation promoting the demographic and material representations of modernity. Further research is discussed.
http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Lee1_4.25.05.pdf