ABSTRACT
One of the important twentieth-century philosophical treatments of old age, La vieillesse by Simone de Beauvoir, presented the anthropological literature as presenting 'natural' aging, the benchmark against which to measure 'historical' societies. The self-consciousness that characterized cultural anthropology extended to its investigations into aging. Ethnographers began to recognize that they had always been confronted with age. Their informants tended to be older individuals, so they paid a bit more attention to the anthropology of old age. As hunting and gathering gave way to herding and agriculture, communal sharing of food with the elderly often went into decline. Physical anthropologists have explored bones and fossils and even made comparative studies of aging among different primates. The implication is that the fewer the elders the greater the honor they enjoyed. Scientists see a common human pattern of increases of mortality at 40 and modal age of death just past 70 for hunter-gatherers.
