Wii human lifespan hit a wall?

 

 Are estimates about the limits of human lifespan too low?

(HealthDay)—It's said that life is short. But people living in developed countries typically survive more than twice as long as their hunter-gatherer ancestors did, making 72 the new 30, according to new research.

Most of the decline in early mortality has occurred in the past century, or four generations, a finding that calls into question traditional theories about aging, the study authors noted.

 "I still can't believe how recent most of the progress is," said Oskar Burger, lead author of a study published online Oct. 15 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But there's a larger message from the research: Our estimates about the limits of human lifespans may be too low. The study findings "make it seem unlikely that there is a looming wall of death ... which kills off individuals at a certain age" because of genetic mutations that build up as we age, said Burger, a postdoctoral fellow at Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. The study authors analyzed the mortality rates in the western world today and those of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. "We show that human mortality has decreased so substantially that the difference between hunter-gatherers and today's lowest-mortality populations is greater than the difference between hunter-gatherers and wild chimpanzees," the researchers wrote.