You're Never Too Old to Rock and Roll
You’re 50, 60, 70, 80, 90. You’re not young anymore. But as Jethro Tull says, “You’re never too old to rock and roll if you’re too young to die”. And you’re always too young to die. For the last two centuries we have been obsessed with youth. For centuries, before that, it was the young who had the highest mortality – as infants, children and young adults. The young were expendable. The survivors were not. So, if you made it out of youth, you were valued. Modern human beings – homo sapiens – at first coexisted with other human species – the Neanderthals, homo erectus and Denisovans – who then disappeared. Some people assume interbreeding. Others suggest we killed them off. Still others suggest a simpler answer that these other species could not compete as homo sapiens populations increased. We don’t know much about the other human species but we do know that the elderly among our Paleolithic ancestors thrived. 30,000 years ago, the proportion of older peopl