Arab News | What We Are Reading Today: ‘Seven Decades’ by Michael D. Gurven

Our ability to live for decades may seem like a modern luxury made possible by clean water and advances in medicine.

In fact, human longevity is a legacy of our unique evolutionary path as a species. “Seven Decades” challenges the belief that life in the past was “nasty, brutish, and short,” tracing how our capacity for long life came to be and transforming how we think about aging.

Blending vivid storytelling with cutting-edge science, anthropologist Michael Gurven weaves tales from his years of field experience among Indigenous societies whose diet and traditional lifeways are closer to how we all lived prior to industrialization.

He provides compelling evidence that our longevity first evolved among our hunting and gathering ancestors and shows how the human body was built to last around seven decades.