“Seven Decades: How We Evolved to Live Longer” with Professor Michael Gurven

About this episode

This episode features Professor Michael Gurven discussing the evolutionary history of human longevity and insights from his research among Indigenous societies.

Our ability to live for many decades is often viewed as a modern luxury made possible by clean water, improved living conditions, and advances in medicine. Yet, human longevity is actually part of our deep evolutionary history. The long-standing belief that life in the past was “nasty, brutish, and short” is a widespread misconception—one rooted in misleading averages and often repeated in textbooks and popular media. In his book “Seven Decades: How We Evolved to Live Longer”, anthropologist Professor Michael Gurven challenges this myth. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, he presents compelling evidence that the capacity for long life first emerged among our hunting and gathering ancestors and argues that the human body is fundamentally designed to function for roughly seven decades. Combining vivid storytelling with rigorous science, Gurven shares insights from years of research among Indigenous societies whose diets and traditional ways of living more closely resemble how humans lived before industrialization. These communities, he shows, experience far lower rates of chronic diseases of aging—such as heart disease, dementia, and diabetes—than populations in industrialized…

People in this episode

Host: Dr Waseem Akhtar

Guest: Professor Michael Gurven

Topics covered

• human longevity
• evolution
• Indigenous societies
• chronic diseases
• anthropology

Keywords

• longevity
• evolution
• health
• Indigenous
• chronic diseases
• anthropology
• diet

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: University of California, Santa Barbara

Books & works: Seven Decades: How We Evolved to Live Longer

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