Surprised? No, we knew that all along.

The January issue of the Smithsonian magazine has an article with this headline:

New Research Dispels the Myth That Ancient Cultures Had Universally Short Lifespans

The article starts off with:

After examining the graves of over 300 people buried in Anglo Saxon English cemeteries between 475 and 625 AD, archaeologist Christine Cave of the Australian National University made a discovery that might surprise you. She found that several of the bodies in the burial grounds were over 75 years old when they died.

Yawn.

We knew this all along, and we've said this numerous times before here.

Yup, we have:

The suggestion of the letter writer was that human beings live longer than they used to. This is a common belief, people state that all the time, but it simply isn't true. People live the same number of years that they always have. That number of years varies by population and culture, but it's generally between 60 and 120 years. Extreme old age generally seems to cap out at an absolute maximum of 120 years, a span that's actually mentioned in the Old Testament, interestingly enough. The longest any human in modern times has been recorded to have live is 122 years. There are claimed examples of people living in excess of this number of years, but they lack verification and tend to be subject to serious questioning. This is not to say, of course, that anyone can live to 120 years. Far from it. Only a tiny minority of people shall ever approach that age. But instances of advance years in any one era are quite easy to find. Chief Washakie, for example, lived to be 99 or 100 years of age and was not the only Native American of that to have done so. Adams and Jefferson lived into their 80s. And so on.

And now to that list we can add some disinterred Anglo Saxons.

So the origin of the "myth".  Well, we repeat what we noted before:

So what does all this mean? Perhaps not that much, but the common modern assumption that we're living longer is simply incorrect. Things aren't killing us before we reach our natural end of life. That's what is occurring.