Human Life Span & Evolution

Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel tells an ancedote about learning the botany on a pacific island I think. Don't have the book handy to refresh my memory. His informant would answer about what the people ate everyday, and only in tough times, and then with a word Jared couldn't understand. So the guy takes Jared to meet the old woman. She was toothless, her people had to chew food for her but she had been alive when a tsunami had struck the island and she remembered what the people could eat to survive such a disaster.Now these people didn't have written records. Old people were their knowledge base and they were important. They carried knowledge that could help the tribe survive disasters of rare occurances.It seems to me that this is a way human longevity could be selected for. Not perfectly but nevertheless it seems possible.The book is a fascinating overview of the developement of civilization and the way humans have spread across the planet.lfen

I'm hoping to do a lot of reading this summer and some of that would be reviewing books and Jared is a favorite author of mine. I honestly don't remember. I'll have to reread it to see. In fact that might have also been in a discussion about menopause as a way to avoid risking the life of older women in child bearing so that they would live longer to give extra support to their offspring thus giving greater survivability to their grandchildren.My memory conflates things with time and without Google or something like it I don't know what I'd do. I don't know if this argument is sound or not but I'm pretty sure that Diamond, or someone like him made it.At any rate human survival is resource intensive. A few offspring are given a lot of care for a long time so apparent efficiency may not always be what works.I know that's pretty fuzzy but it's something to consider.lfen