Famed for centuries for its residents' unusual longevity, the Chinese village of Bama now has 81 centenarians. Proportional to population, that is roughly five times China's average. A decade ago the best-known settlement in the county rebranded itself as Longevity Village.
Yang Ze, deputy director of the Institute of Geriatrics at Beijing hospital, began researching Bama's secret in the mid-90s. One key, he said, is natural selection. The area is remote and mountainous. In the old days, it took three days to leave the hills, so there was relatively little mixing with the outside world. In tough conditions, without medical treatment, the strong genes remained; the weak were eliminated.
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There is almost no evidence at all of cancer before the age of industrialization. Most of the increase in life expectancy is due to the reduction in infant mortality; many people have always lived relatively long lives. If half the children die in infancy and everyone else lived to 80, life expectancy was 40. Those people, like those in places like Hunza, also famous for longevity, lived so long because of their remoteness from the "modern" world, life in a place where people walked and lived in families. In times like these when the environment is under serious attack there are few things less truly contemporary, or "modern" than all the crass ideas that are paraded before the world by the corporate media as "modernity." Do you think we should see ourselves as custodians of a beautiful little planet or as future masters of the universe? Who is pushing this latter vision? Who thinks that they are going to be in a position to buy tickets to the stars? Who do we always see pictured at the controls of the starship?
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