More advanced? Humans age and die at the 'same rate as primates'

By Daily Mail Reporter


-Primate males also die sooner than females

In the wild: Man ages and dies at the same rate as primates, despite our access to modern medicine and increasingly sophisticated technology


It seems humans have more in common with chimpanzees and gorillas than perhaps we'd like to admit.

Man ages and dies at the same rate as primates, despite our access to modern medicine and increasingly sophisticated technology, according to a study.

For a long time it was thought that humans aged more slowly than other animals. This belief was upheld by scientific studies of short-lived creatures ranging from rats to fruit flies.

But the first multi-species comparison of human ageing patterns with other primates suggest the pace of human ageing may not be so unique after all.


Study co-author Susan Alberts, of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina, said: 'There's been this argument in the scientific literature for a long time that human ageing was unique, but we didn't have data on aging in wild primates besides chimps until recently.

'Humans are really very much more similar in their aging patterns to other primates than anyone had suspected before.'

The researchers combined data from long-term studies of seven species of wild primates - capuchin monkeys from Costa Rica; muriqui monkeys from Brazil; baboons and blue monkeys from Kenya; chimpanzees from Tanzania; gorillas from Rwanda; and sifaka lemurs from Madagascar.

The team, whose findings were published in the journal Science, focused not on the inevitable decline in health or fertility that come with advancing age, but rather on the risk of dying.

When they compared human aging rates - measured as the rate at which mortality risk increases with age - to similar data for nearly 3,000 individual monkeys, apes and lemurs, the human data fell neatly within the primate continuum.

'Human patterns are not strikingly different, even though wild primates experience sources of mortality from which humans may be protected,' the study said.

The results will prove surprising to some as humans live longer than many animals. There are some exceptions - parrots, seabirds, clams and tortoises can all outlive us - but humans stand out as the longest-lived primates.

'Humans live for many more years past our reproductive prime,' co-author Anne Bronikowski, from Iowa State University, said.

'If we were like other mammals, we would start dying fairly rapidly after we reach mid-life. But we don't.'

The results also confirm a pattern observed in humans and elsewhere in the animal kingdom - as males age, they die sooner than their female counterparts.

In primates, the mortality gap between males and females is narrowest for the species with the least amount of male-male aggression - a monkey called the muriqui - the researchers found.

Co-author Karen Strier, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, said: 'Muriquis are the only species in our sample in which males do not compete overtly with one another for access to mates.'

The results suggest the reason why males of other species die faster than females may be the stress and strain of competition, the authors said.

Do the findings have any practical implications for humans? Modern medicine is helping humans live longer than ever before, the researchers note.

'Yet we still don't know what governs maximum life span,' Ms Alberts said. 'Some human studies suggest we might be able to live a lot longer than we do now.

'Looking to other primates to understand where we are and aren't flexible in our ageing will help answer that question.'



Source:dailymail