Chimpanzee lifespan3/15/2023 ![]() ![]() On the other hand, humans without access to modern medical care and who live in traditional hunter-gatherer societies can live to their mid-80s. With medical care in captivity, they can live into their 60s. In the wild, the lifespan of chimpanzees is about 45, at the oldest. Humans have a longer lifespan than chimpanzees. For both species, this encompassed the whole adult lifespan under natural conditions. It was already known that macaque monkeys, separated from humans by about 30 million years, do not show humanlike, widespread brain atrophy in aging.īecause humans and chimpanzees grow, develop and age on different schedules, the study compared humans from age 22 to 88 and chimpanzees from age 10 to 51. We were most surprised that chimpanzees, who are separated from humans by only 6-8 million years of independent evolution, did not more closely resemble the human pattern of brain aging. Instead, Sherwood and colleagues suggest that as humans evolved the ability to live longer, the result was a “high degree of brain degeneration” as people get older. They found that chimpanzees do not display significant loss, or atrophy, in the size of their brains and other internal structures as they age. The researchers – anthropologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, biologists, and veterinary professionals – used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure the space occupied by various brain structures in adult humans and chimpanzees, including the frontal lobe and the hippocampus, an area of the brain associated with short-term and long-term memory. Such data on regional brain volumes in chimpanzees was not available until now. universities put forward the question to see if comparable data on the effects of aging could be found in chimpanzees. The research appears in the Jonline issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Ĭhet Sherwood, an anthropologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and a team of scientists from seven other U.S. Brains shrink in humans, potentially causing a number of health problems and mental illnesses as people age, but do they shrink to the same extent in the closest living relatives to humans – the chimpanzees? New research says no, making brain shrinkage in aging humans unique. ![]()
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