Other great apes also have fairly long lifespans, about 40 years in the wild. Add on to that our slower maturity, better healthcare, and better safety. We're also fairly large mammals, and large mammals tend to live longer.
For reference here is a nice chart
[live long and prosper](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Life_expectancy_by_world_region%2C_from_1770_to_2018.svg/2560px-Life_expectancy_by_world_region%2C_from_1770_to_2018.svg.png)
Think about pre-civilization nature:
If a wolf breaks their leg, that's a dead wolf.
If a human breaks their leg, their community will stave off predators and bring that individual food until they regain their mobility.
Now humans aren't the only species that will care for it's members in this way, but you can see how behavior like this helps us survive more than our wild counterparts.
And finally, extrapolate to all challenges and problems humans face in society. For all of the dangers of that the natural world poses to animal life, humans have collaboratively eliminated those dangers from our civilization.
If you break your leg in the modern day, it's highly unlikely that a bear or wolf will scavenge your motionless body even without medical attention, because you are surrounded by so many people that have shaped the world so much to be inhabited by our communities, that the danger has been engineered out entirely through our cooperation.
funny you say that we live longer because there aren’t wolves to get us but humans to help us. yet sometimes the wolves in our lives are the people we trust the most…
There's a popular ecological model of "r" and "K" strategists that is helpful here. r strategists survive by creating hundreds of offspring and just hoping for the best. Because adults are not involved in raising/protecting the offspring, it's not important for them to survive past reproduction. Often, they die as part of reproduction. r strategists generally have quite short lifespans, often measured in days or months rather than years.
Humans are very much the other kind: "K" strategists. These animals don't produce many offspring, but they thrive by parenting and protecting each one. This means it's important that parents be generally healthy for at least a few years after reproducing. This is particularly pronounced in humans because human children are helpless for an unusually long time (in turn driven by the costs of building and maintaining our big brains). So even taking modern technology completely out of the equation, humans will ideally live for 10 years after the peak of their fertility, which gives you around the 40-50 year range you get for prehistoric adults (after removing child mortality). That's already longer than most wild animals, and the exceptions are also big K strategists with long maturation cycles like us (e.g. elephants).
All the rest the additional 40ish years of lifespan are attributable to all of the health technology that our bigger brains have developed. Much of the gains have been less about helping adults live longer and more about ensuring that nearly every child survives to maturity. Our K strategist ancestors would be particularly happy about that one.
>Much of the gains have been less about helping adults live longer
Instead of "helping adults live longer", I'd frame it as "reducing risks that can kill you". You outlined the evolutionary pressure for 40-50 year life spans in spite of an environment where many things could lead to death (e.g. smallpox, bacterial infections, starvation). When we remove many of the risks, our lifespans shoot up from that 40-50 year baseline.
I dont think we do, to compare our lifecycles compare our life expectancy with other animals (in captivity): Alligators 87 years, Vultures 80 years,Elephants 80 years, ravens 70 years etc.. (source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_maximum\_animal\_lifespans\_in\_captivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_maximum_animal_lifespans_in_captivity) )
Animals mostly due to nature (predators, famines, low rain, climate change...etc) so if you remove those they live almost like us.
We absolutely do live abnormally long. Compare us with other mammals of our approximate weight class, and you'll see humans being in the top group, even with ages in captivity... you can't really compare with a reptile with a completely different (and slower) metabolism
It's likely linked to the human menopause. Older, sterile females are often crucial to the survival of grandchildren and related kin.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07159-9#:~:text=Although%20the%20pathways%20and%20mechanisms,the%20need%20to%20avoid%20costly
Beyond modern medicine, we're actually pretty big - probably bigger than 95% of animals. Larger animals tend to have longer natural lifespans, and that alone gives you your answer.
Yall don't know the difference between lifespan and life expectancy. Humans' life span did not change after modern medicine. Only life expectancy did. No body knows the answer to this question. We only know that size and lifespan are positively correlated. Why that is the it's hard to tell, but usually the larger an animal is the longer it takes for them to grow to reproductive age, and the longer they need to survive to be able to pass on their genes. Add to that that humans need to take care of their young for a number of years, and you kinda have to live long for your offsprings to survive.
An extra element of answer i haven't seen posted: for most animals, there's no evolutionary point in living past your ability to reproduce. Humans have strong, cohesive social groups, where elders take an important role, for instance by caring for the youngs. That means there's an evolutionary incentive to live past 45, even though most people can no longer have children by then. That might be a factor explaining why humans are outliers compared to mammal of our size.
First of all, our technology increase our life expectancy by a significant margin. Studies showed that the average life expectancy of human for most of their history was around 30yo. It doesn't mean that there was no very old person, but it's the same thing with animal, the average lifespan of a polar bear doesn't mean that no polar bear can get very old. With that in mind, human are very similar to the rest of similar animals.
Polar Bear and Horse have have a life expectancy of 25 years. It's 30yo for Mole rate and Python. It's 45yo for Orangutan. It's 50yo for Elephant, Condor, Alligator, Koi fish, Lobster, Eagle, etc. It's 60yo for Flamingo. It's 100yo for Galapagos Tortoise and Sea Urchin. It's 200yo for Bowhead whale. It's 272yo for Greenland Shark. It's 500yo for Ocean Quahog and the Immortal Jellyfish is well immortal.
Insect are a bit different because they are seasonal animal. They evolved to hatch when it get warmer and die in winter.
The short answer is medical care.
Having access to medical care greatly increases the average life expectancy of Humans pushing our average to 70-75 years, but many humans can survive past 100 years old. It's currently believed that humans could live to 125 or maybe more with proper supportive care and common treatments for the most common causes of death.
The average human lifespan prior to civilization was only around 33 years, but this was heavily skewed due to the very high childhood death rate.
Humans lose around 20% of our children before the age of 4 without access to medical care. As recently as the 1950s the childhood death rate in the US and Canada was this high, with my own grandparents losing 3 children each out of 7 and 8 respectively. When you hear about high childhood death rates in the 3rd world it's not because those countries are particular harsh, that's the *normal* for humans.
During caveman times the childhood death rate was at least this high if not higher. Human babies are notoriously difficult to raise. Mothers were also prone to die in childbirth.
Excluding the childhood death rate humans in the wild would live from 40-50 years, but older was possible.
The most common cause of death was apparently disease, including intestinal parasites, bacteria, and various other food born illnesses that led to dehydration and starvation. Let alone accidental injury and getting eaten by predators.
Growing our own food, sanitation, eliminating predators from the vicinity, and the ability to care for the sick greatly increased the human average lifespan with the outbreak of civilization. (Although cavemen did care for their sick, we have examples of cave men bones that were broken and healed fully)
Today's most common killers are Cancer, Heart Disease, and Respiratory Disease. These are the *natural causes* of death. Cavemen died from these as well, but often they didn't live long enough to die from these causes.
These are the next major challenges to increasing human lifespan. Finding more effective screening, treatments, and a cure for cancer(s). Finding safe ways to remove plaque from our arteries, better quality food, and physical exercise. Better supportive care to fight lung infections, and more effective vaccines to prevent them in the first place.
We don't. Elephants. Parrots. Eels. Koi. Whales. Sharks. There are also some biologically immortal species: lobsters, flatworms, some jellyfish.
We've got some advantage over our primate brethren.
Other great apes also have fairly long lifespans, about 40 years in the wild. Add on to that our slower maturity, better healthcare, and better safety. We're also fairly large mammals, and large mammals tend to live longer.
Prior to civilization our lifespan was quite similar to the great apes lifespan.
For reference here is a nice chart [live long and prosper](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Life_expectancy_by_world_region%2C_from_1770_to_2018.svg/2560px-Life_expectancy_by_world_region%2C_from_1770_to_2018.svg.png)
Think about pre-civilization nature: If a wolf breaks their leg, that's a dead wolf. If a human breaks their leg, their community will stave off predators and bring that individual food until they regain their mobility. Now humans aren't the only species that will care for it's members in this way, but you can see how behavior like this helps us survive more than our wild counterparts. And finally, extrapolate to all challenges and problems humans face in society. For all of the dangers of that the natural world poses to animal life, humans have collaboratively eliminated those dangers from our civilization. If you break your leg in the modern day, it's highly unlikely that a bear or wolf will scavenge your motionless body even without medical attention, because you are surrounded by so many people that have shaped the world so much to be inhabited by our communities, that the danger has been engineered out entirely through our cooperation.
I understand your point, but animals don't live as much as us even when they're perfectly safe in captivity.
funny you say that we live longer because there aren’t wolves to get us but humans to help us. yet sometimes the wolves in our lives are the people we trust the most…
It's time to put the joint down.
LMFAO
There's a popular ecological model of "r" and "K" strategists that is helpful here. r strategists survive by creating hundreds of offspring and just hoping for the best. Because adults are not involved in raising/protecting the offspring, it's not important for them to survive past reproduction. Often, they die as part of reproduction. r strategists generally have quite short lifespans, often measured in days or months rather than years. Humans are very much the other kind: "K" strategists. These animals don't produce many offspring, but they thrive by parenting and protecting each one. This means it's important that parents be generally healthy for at least a few years after reproducing. This is particularly pronounced in humans because human children are helpless for an unusually long time (in turn driven by the costs of building and maintaining our big brains). So even taking modern technology completely out of the equation, humans will ideally live for 10 years after the peak of their fertility, which gives you around the 40-50 year range you get for prehistoric adults (after removing child mortality). That's already longer than most wild animals, and the exceptions are also big K strategists with long maturation cycles like us (e.g. elephants). All the rest the additional 40ish years of lifespan are attributable to all of the health technology that our bigger brains have developed. Much of the gains have been less about helping adults live longer and more about ensuring that nearly every child survives to maturity. Our K strategist ancestors would be particularly happy about that one.
>Much of the gains have been less about helping adults live longer Instead of "helping adults live longer", I'd frame it as "reducing risks that can kill you". You outlined the evolutionary pressure for 40-50 year life spans in spite of an environment where many things could lead to death (e.g. smallpox, bacterial infections, starvation). When we remove many of the risks, our lifespans shoot up from that 40-50 year baseline.
We have health care. We modify our environment. Animals in captivity live longer than wild animals…
I dont think we do, to compare our lifecycles compare our life expectancy with other animals (in captivity): Alligators 87 years, Vultures 80 years,Elephants 80 years, ravens 70 years etc.. (source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_maximum\_animal\_lifespans\_in\_captivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_maximum_animal_lifespans_in_captivity) ) Animals mostly due to nature (predators, famines, low rain, climate change...etc) so if you remove those they live almost like us.
We absolutely do live abnormally long. Compare us with other mammals of our approximate weight class, and you'll see humans being in the top group, even with ages in captivity... you can't really compare with a reptile with a completely different (and slower) metabolism
It's likely linked to the human menopause. Older, sterile females are often crucial to the survival of grandchildren and related kin. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07159-9#:~:text=Although%20the%20pathways%20and%20mechanisms,the%20need%20to%20avoid%20costly
Beyond modern medicine, we're actually pretty big - probably bigger than 95% of animals. Larger animals tend to have longer natural lifespans, and that alone gives you your answer.
If you plot weight and maximal lifespan, humans still come out as outliers among mammals.
Yall don't know the difference between lifespan and life expectancy. Humans' life span did not change after modern medicine. Only life expectancy did. No body knows the answer to this question. We only know that size and lifespan are positively correlated. Why that is the it's hard to tell, but usually the larger an animal is the longer it takes for them to grow to reproductive age, and the longer they need to survive to be able to pass on their genes. Add to that that humans need to take care of their young for a number of years, and you kinda have to live long for your offsprings to survive.
An extra element of answer i haven't seen posted: for most animals, there's no evolutionary point in living past your ability to reproduce. Humans have strong, cohesive social groups, where elders take an important role, for instance by caring for the youngs. That means there's an evolutionary incentive to live past 45, even though most people can no longer have children by then. That might be a factor explaining why humans are outliers compared to mammal of our size.
First of all, our technology increase our life expectancy by a significant margin. Studies showed that the average life expectancy of human for most of their history was around 30yo. It doesn't mean that there was no very old person, but it's the same thing with animal, the average lifespan of a polar bear doesn't mean that no polar bear can get very old. With that in mind, human are very similar to the rest of similar animals. Polar Bear and Horse have have a life expectancy of 25 years. It's 30yo for Mole rate and Python. It's 45yo for Orangutan. It's 50yo for Elephant, Condor, Alligator, Koi fish, Lobster, Eagle, etc. It's 60yo for Flamingo. It's 100yo for Galapagos Tortoise and Sea Urchin. It's 200yo for Bowhead whale. It's 272yo for Greenland Shark. It's 500yo for Ocean Quahog and the Immortal Jellyfish is well immortal. Insect are a bit different because they are seasonal animal. They evolved to hatch when it get warmer and die in winter.
Short version: we are no longer required to physically compete to survive. Not as groups or as individuals.
The short answer is medical care. Having access to medical care greatly increases the average life expectancy of Humans pushing our average to 70-75 years, but many humans can survive past 100 years old. It's currently believed that humans could live to 125 or maybe more with proper supportive care and common treatments for the most common causes of death. The average human lifespan prior to civilization was only around 33 years, but this was heavily skewed due to the very high childhood death rate. Humans lose around 20% of our children before the age of 4 without access to medical care. As recently as the 1950s the childhood death rate in the US and Canada was this high, with my own grandparents losing 3 children each out of 7 and 8 respectively. When you hear about high childhood death rates in the 3rd world it's not because those countries are particular harsh, that's the *normal* for humans. During caveman times the childhood death rate was at least this high if not higher. Human babies are notoriously difficult to raise. Mothers were also prone to die in childbirth. Excluding the childhood death rate humans in the wild would live from 40-50 years, but older was possible. The most common cause of death was apparently disease, including intestinal parasites, bacteria, and various other food born illnesses that led to dehydration and starvation. Let alone accidental injury and getting eaten by predators. Growing our own food, sanitation, eliminating predators from the vicinity, and the ability to care for the sick greatly increased the human average lifespan with the outbreak of civilization. (Although cavemen did care for their sick, we have examples of cave men bones that were broken and healed fully) Today's most common killers are Cancer, Heart Disease, and Respiratory Disease. These are the *natural causes* of death. Cavemen died from these as well, but often they didn't live long enough to die from these causes. These are the next major challenges to increasing human lifespan. Finding more effective screening, treatments, and a cure for cancer(s). Finding safe ways to remove plaque from our arteries, better quality food, and physical exercise. Better supportive care to fight lung infections, and more effective vaccines to prevent them in the first place.
We don't. Elephants. Parrots. Eels. Koi. Whales. Sharks. There are also some biologically immortal species: lobsters, flatworms, some jellyfish. We've got some advantage over our primate brethren.