Archive for the ‘humanity’ Category
human longevity stuff: Blue Zones
The other day, I was talking to friends about human health and longevity and the claim, in a book I use for teaching English to NESB adults, that Okinawans are known for their longevity and that this is likely due to self-sufficiency, physical activity, diet and regular human interaction. While this was generally accepted in our discussion, I received some mild push-back to the effect that this had been exaggerated somewhat, and that the concept of ‘blue zones’, which I’d never heard of, had been largely debunked. So, let me look into this.
A December 2025 article in The Gerontologist, also published in the National Library of Medicine, entitled ‘The validity of Blue Zones demography: a response to critiques’, and which has two named authors, opens with these remarks in its abstract:
Blue Zones are geographically and temporally defined areas with a history of disproportionately high concentrations of nonagenarians and centenarians. Nearly two decades ago, these zones gained international attention when the Blue Zone term was introduced in seminal articles published in Experimental Gerontology and National Geographic. Since then, numerous scientific papers have extracted valuable insights into human health from investigating the long-lived people who live there. However recently, validity of the ages of people living in the Blue Zones has been questioned. Here, we address these concerns by describing in detail the age validation process undertaken in Blue Zones and comparing it to the prevailing standards in gerontological demography.
The abstract goes on to point out what is fairly obvious, that ‘most self-reported claims of exceptional longevity are false’, and of course I remember reading in the Bible about 969-year-old Methuselah and his remarkable rellies. Well, at least their god is real, en it? Anyway, the abstract ends with the claim that ‘cross-checking multiple independent documentary sources’ has effectively minimised or eliminated ‘errors due to fraud, honest mistakes, poor memory, or identity switches, especially between homonymous [identically – or near identically-named] siblings’. And this, it’s claimed, leaves us with Blue Zones that are ‘valid and reliable’.
Reading on, the paper states that Japan has been accurately found to be the longest-lived country for at least the last century, but more importantly for this little essay, it highlights the work of a 19th century pioneering demographer and folklorist (he apparently coined the term ‘folklore’), William Thoms, who proposed these steps for verifying longevity claims:
(i) search for official birth records; (ii) check the records for other individuals with the same name; (iii) corroborate the birth record with additional forms of evidence; and (iv) if the person is still alive, verify as much as possible by quizzing the person about things such as public events that can be cross-checked with additional data sources.
These are a start; in the 21st century we generally have more effective record-keeping, at least in the ‘first world’. In those countries where, unsurprisingly, records aren’t so well kept, credulous investigators can be duped. This happened when National Geographic sent a Harvard physician, Alexander Leaf, to various soi-disant ‘longevity hotspots’, in Equador, Pakistan and the region now known as Azerbaijan, in the early 1970s. Leaf’s report, apparently, was a monument to credulity, and was soon invalidated by more experienced analysts, but it all eventually led to what became the ‘Blue Zone’ disputes. The term is explained in the Gerontologist article, referenced below.
When one of us … in 1999 presented for the first time data suggesting the existence of exceptionally long-lived communities in the central area of the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, where the proportion of centenarians was demonstrably higher than in the rest of the island (Pes, 1999), most demographers reacted with skepticism. From 2001 to 2019, a collaboration with the Belgian demographer Michel Poulain was able to demonstrate that Sardinian longevity in these areas was genuine. For instance, it was determined that people born in this longevity hotspot between 1880 and 1900 were nearly three times as likely to live to the age of 100 years as Sardinians living outside the area. The area was dubbed a Blue Zone because of the blue marker used to indicate the area on a map. The first scientific article mentioning this term was published in Experimental Gerontology in 2004 (Poulain et al., 2004).
So the Blue Zone concept has been extended to other regions based on careful research (I cannot, of course, confirm this, but the article goes to great lengths to present and justify its methodology – in fact that’s the article’s entire purpose, so all skeptics should read it). Four areas, in particular, have been confirmed, and are ‘generally accepted by the international scientific community’, along with the Blue Zone concept: Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; and Nicoya, in north-western Costa Rica. These regions are separately dealt with in detail in the article, so I would be hard put to provide a summary here. The article also points out that Blue Zones can come and go, or weaken or strengthen, due to immigration, emigration, westernisation or other factors. Okinawa, for example, has recently been in dispute regarding its status due to some of these factors, as has the Nicoya zone.
Finally, I’ll just quote the age verification processes used:
… it requires: (i) identifying potential high-longevity target areas based on public demographic databases; (ii) accurately counting the number of people born in the target area, categorised by sex and year of birth; (iii) identifying and confirming the age, using additional data sources, of individuals who have reached a preset threshold age (e.g., 90 years); and (iv) calculating the ratio of the 90+ population to total births recorded during the same time interval. This ratio reflects the probability of people born in the target area to reach the threshold age. The process is designed to minimise the likelihood of false positives (type I errors) and ensure accurate identification of Blue Zones.
And I’ll just finish by mentioning a few points. The first-described Blue Zone, in Sardinia, as mentioned, doesn’t include the whole island, but ‘six villages located in the hills of a rural region in east central Sardinia called Ogliastra containing about 12,000 people’. The percentage of centenarians there…
was approximately five times as high as the percentage of centenarians throughout Europe and nearly three times the percentage in Sardinia as a whole. Equally surprising, although worldwide there are roughly three times as many female as male centenarians—in the Sardinian Blue Zone there were approximately equal numbers of male and female centenarians (Poulain et al., 2004). Since that original analysis, the proportion of centenarians in this Blue Zone has increased (Poulain & Herm, 2025).
That is really fascinating, as it brings to mind the general question of female longevity in comparison to that of males. Something for another post, perhaps. It also, of course, raises the question of why only one area of Sardinia qualifies as a Blue Zone. No answer is provided or attempted. And, to be fair, the article’s purpose is to validate the existence of Blue Zones, not to explain why they exist.
The Blue Zone in Nicoya, Costa Rica, has, on re-investigation, shrunk to about a quarter of its size compared to earlier studies, but ‘a new Blue Zone had emerged in three provinces in northern Costa Rica near the Nicaraguan border’. The Blue Zone on the mountainous Greek Island of Ikaria, which has a population of about 8,000, has been validated between 2008 and 2009, with details provided. And while there is evidence of false claims regarding centenarians in Japan, the data from Okinawa has been validated.
Of course there is speculation as to why these Blue Zones exist, and why they tend to occur in ‘under-developed’ regions. Often under-developed regions have high crime rates, and lower life expectancies, but more isolated and self-sustaining regions appear not to have experienced these problems. It does seem to be the case that community support and connection, physical activity, as well as some genetic elements as yet uncovered, are an important part of the answer.
Reference
more on bonobos, sex and ‘evolutionary psychology’
don’t worry, bonobo-human males can still be tough guys…
So, back to the essay by Ryan Ellsworth, which bears the mocking title, ‘Dr. Strangeape, or How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bonobo‘.
As for loving the bonobo, an animal I’ve written about many times, I’m reminded of when I first learned about these creatures, on ABC radio’s Science Show back in the eighties. The reporter finished the segment semi-facetiously saying ‘Vive les bonobos! I want to be one!’ I’ve never quite been the same since.
And going back further in my history, to my childhood and teen years, feeling trapped by my parents’ loveless and somewhat toxic marriage, I read, or at least skimmed, Bruno Bettelheim’s Children of the Dream, which told of a more open system of child-rearing in which, or so I imagined, one could choose one’s own parental figures and protectors, within some kind of ‘open field’ of role models and playmates. A sense of entrapment and yearning…
The point I’m making here is that, for me, bonobos are a touchstone, just as the potential of the kibbutzim was a touchstone in my youth. And however one thinks of agriculturalism, the development of enclosed nuclear families behind walls of ownership, has proven disastrous for some as well as being a boon for others, in terms of inheritance, both genetic and material.
But let’s return to Ellsworth’s critique. Take this intriguing passage:
Block refers to babies to care for, and reputations to protect, but does not seem to understand the significance of these two things for understanding human sex differences in sexual desire. Perhaps she privately does, but to acknowledge the significance of these forces on the evolution of human sexuality would severely compromise her arguments, as it demands recognition of the fact that women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men. To argue that females are as interested as males in sexual variety is to buy into a sexist worldview wherein the male is the typical specimen of the species by which to compare females (Saxon, 2012). Although ostensibly parading under the guise of liberation, such a position is no less sexist or anti-feminist than is the oppression of women’s sexuality.
Eh what? As to women having reputations to protect, I’m reminded of the women who were stoned to death for adultery in early Judaeo-Christian days, while the men received little more than a finger-wag. That would surely have made a difference to women’s overt behaviour. That ‘women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity equal to men’ says nothing about the actual desires of women – surely an individual thing – and everything about societal pressures within patriarchy. And Ellsworth’s claim here that suggesting females might be as interested in sexual variety as males is sexist because males have been doing it (with impunity) for generations – and so this is the ‘natural’ pattern for males but not for females – is, to me, a mind-bogglingly sexist argument. He has surely got to be kidding.
So before I go on with this analysis, let’s be clear about something. The reason that bonobos are something of an inspiration – for me at least – is that they are female dominant, and they are less violent than chimps. The sex thing is, for me, the cherry on top, while I also recognise that the sexual activity – mostly mutual masturbation – and the reduction in violence, and greater empathy, are intimately connected.
And they’re our closest living relatives, so we can learn, by studying how they came to differ from chimps, and trying to understand how humans came to be so chimpishly patriarchal, lessons for our future.
While things are changing, we live in an extremely patriarchal society. There are some 195 nations recognised currently, and 18 of them have a female head of state. That’s less than 10%, and this is likely a record for female leadership. Another source of power is wealth, a much murkier issue, but I don’t think it would be unreasonable to claim that 99% of the world’s wealth is in the hands of men. A world ‘turned upside down’ in terms of these figures, however delicious to contemplate, isn’t going to happen in the lifetimes of any of our great-great-great-great grandchildren. But that’s only a couple of hundred years, at most. Who knows how many thousands of years it took for patriarchy to become the human norm?
We can look, though, at so-called hunter-gatherer societies. I say ‘so-called’ because I’ve been told that this is now a much-contested term. Writers and researchers such as Bruce Pascoe and Bill Gammage have focussed on Australian Aboriginals’ understanding and treatment of their land to provide a much more nuanced picture of their lifestyle, though this has become politically contested here to a tedious degree. It may also be reasonable to assume that the blanket term ‘Aboriginal culture’ is too facile, given their multitude of language groups, and the variety of environments upon which they depended. In any case there is a standard view that ‘men’s business’ and ‘women’s business’ were/are separate but complementary. And hunter-gatherer groups or tribes in Africa, some still extant, are generally regarded as egalitarian, suggesting that this was the norm for all humans before what we term ‘civilisation’, the building of civil structures, both material and in terms of operational hierarchy.
Okay, back again to Ellsworth. He argues that Block ignores or downplays the political side of bonobo sex:
If Block had examined the political side of sex, it would have become clear that among bonobos sex is a mechanism of achieving and maintaining status, and a means of social manipulation wielded mainly by females. Most noncopulatory sexual behavior in bonobos takes the form of genito-genital rubbing between adult females, with subordinate females using their sexual receptivity to curry favor from higher-ranking females, most often in the context of feeding. Note that selection pressures for variety and quantity of reproductive partners are not the same as those for nonconceptive sexual activity such as genito-genital rubbing, as female bonobos display discriminative mate choice around the time of ovulation.
Ellsworth seems to ignore that bonobos also engage in this sexual activity for pleasure, just as humans do in the post-contraceptive, post-Catholic WEIRD world. And I’m not ignoring the fact that bonobo females engage in all that genito-genital rubbing to create bonds within the female community which, inter alia, keeps uppity males in their place. And, yes, females display discriminative mate choice, not only for themselves but also for their offspring, as Martin Surbeck cutely describes in a New Scientist article:
If your mum gets too involved in your love life, spare a thought for bonobos. Females of these great apes, which are closely related to chimpanzees, help their sons with hook-ups, guard the young lovers while they mate, and even haul rival males off females mid-sex.
Interesting to note that it’s their sons’ sex lives that concerns them, not their daughters’. Shades of the old patriarchy?
But Ellsworth, I think, downplays the pleasure-bonding aspects of bonobo sexuality in favour of the political – a typically male bias. Both are important, but it’s surely better to mix your politics with wankery than warfare, another reason for considering bonobos as an archetype and exploring why humans went the way of patriarchy – and extreme patriarchy at that. Anyhoo, let’s consider this passage:
….. maybe in some respects bonobos are similar to humans in sexual behavior, but not in the ways that Block intends to convey, and the differences are far greater than the similarities. If we do wish to focus on similarities, the most apparent and basic of all is that in both species sexual behavior is not a public good, but a commodity.
Again Ellsworth is keen to focus on the political over the pleasurable, making a false either/or distinction. But he doesn’t speculate anywhere in the essay about why bonobo females became dominant – he’s too interested in claiming why they cannot in any way be seen as a model for humanity. The essay pushes this argument with monotonous regularity, combined with ridicule. Frans de Waal, on the other hand, offers this, in Bonobo, the forgotten ape:
Bonobo society offers females a more relaxed existence. Females control the resources, dominate the males, and have little to compete over aside from their sons’ careers. The rich forest habitat of the bonobo evidently permits such an organisation. Our ancestors, however, adapted to a much harsher environment.
Frans de Waal, Bonobo, the forgotten ape, p 135
This more plentiful and relaxed environment is worth speculating on in our post-industrial age – at least in the WEIRD world. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, in my own youth I worked in several factories – Simpson-Pope, Wilkins Servis, Atco Structures, Tubemakers of Australia, and Griffin Press. They have all since closed down – not, I hope because of me. They’ve become obsolete, or mechanised, or shipped offshore. Hard, physical labour is becoming rarer in our modern society, in which brain work is much more valued. The rich, post-industrial habitat of WEIRD human society offers females a more relaxed existence. Females can control the resources, dominate the males, and have little to compete over aside from their sons’ and daughters’ careers.
Interestingly, it’s been found that bonobo males engage in lots of fighting for hierarchical positions and the attention of the females – just not in as deadly a way as chimps.
And meanwhile, there’s that sex thing….
References
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491501300115
Frans de Waal & Frans Lanting, Bonobo: the forgotten ape, 1997
https://www.science.org/content/article/bonobos-hippie-chimps-might-not-be-so-mellow-after-all
bonobo issues
Something I encountered in S J Gould’s book Life’s Grandeur, added to other little encounters in my readings and researchings, has caused a few concerns. In trying to promote bonoboism, of a kind, the last thing I’d want to do is limit humanity’s intellectual pursuits, curiosity, adaptability and general gung-ho cleverness. As if I had the power haha. So whenever I read or hear something that might suggest that bonobos aren’t as smart as chimps I get worried.
Anyway, my reading, as usual, took me on some internet journeys, in one of which I found that the average chimp brain volume is 398 cc while that of bonobos is 348 cc. Remember of course that bonobos used to be known as pygmy chimps, and the average difference in overall size between the two species pretty well corresponds to the difference in brain size, and, as smart corvids and other birds remind us, size isn’t always an indicator of such things.
But there are other worries. I’ve gotten the impression that chimps are very much tool-users, bonobos perhaps not so much. But now, on consulting the literature more closely, I’m finding that maybe this isn’t so, and so I’m losing the point of this post. But of course there are differences, behaviourally, and so cognitively, between the two species, which would be worth exploring, for our future’s sake.
A scientific article, linked below, going back to 2010, and not fully available to amateurs like me, has this to say in its abstract:
Our observations illustrate that tool use in bonobos can be highly complex and no different from what has been described for chimpanzees. The only major difference in the chimpanzee and bonobo data was that bonobos of all age–sex classes used tools in a play context, a possible manifestation of their neotenous nature. We also found that female bonobos displayed a larger range of tool use behaviours than males, a pattern previously described for chimpanzees but not for other great apes. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the female-biased tool use evolved prior to the split between bonobos and chimpanzees.
As to their ‘neotenous’ (i.e. eternally childlike) nature, I’m wondering. Are they really any more childlike than chimps? Apparently, that’s the consensus. A more recent piece in Current Biology by Isabel Behncke, ‘Play in the Peter Pan ape’ (Peter Pan being the boy who never grows up) looks into this issue of bonobo neoteny, and play, noting that there’s a ‘small cluster of species in which adult play occurs, such as elephants, primates, social carnivores, cetaceans, parrots and corvids’. These are all highly social species, with otherwise little in the way of evolutionary connection. They do have other connections, though, apart form sociality – longevity, and neural complexity.
Behncke, in studying bonobos in the wild, argues that bonobos are more neotenous and playful than chimps, and one of her reasons for this corresponds with my own thoughts, happily. They live in a relatively abundant calorific habitat, and ‘play is energetically expensive and dwindles in conditions of resource scarcity’. Hence all those videos featuring pets at play. Hence, also, our own playful nature – sport, art, music, salons and pub chit-chat. Even our scientific explorations can be considered a form of play, at a stretch.
And then there’s sex, that Big Issue that humans beat themselves up about. Bonobo play is less solitary than that of chimps, and more sexual. I also would note that the development of tool use, which has, as mentioned, been more associated with females than males, in both bonobos and chimps, is surely associated with play. But much play between bonobos is genital-based. ‘Chasing’, especially around a solitary object such as a tree, and genital-grabbing is common, which of course can be potentially painful, but according to Behncke virtually never results in serious injury. This often happens between members of different troupes, and Behncke points out here a vital difference between the two tightly related primates. Chimps exhibit hostility between troupes, with ‘wars’ sometimes ending in wipeouts, as Jane Goodall and others have reported. Of the often fatal injuries sustained, mutilated genitals are high on the list.
So, about the sex. But first, it should be noted that communal or paired play is often about trust. The ‘hanging’ game, for example, is often played between an adult and a juvenile bonobo, in which the adult lets the child dangle from her arm, from a more or less high tree branch. Like bungee jumping, without the elasticity, but with much of the thrill. Also, play (and sex) occurs with a multitude of partners, with attendant advantages:
Play-partner diversity is important when thinking about adaptability: playing 100 times with the same individual requires less variation and adjustment of behaviour than playing 10 times with 10 different individuals. Playing with individuals of different sizes, personalities and sex requires learning about contextual-dependent behaviour: with whom and when a bite is appropriate, a chase over a push, a gentle tickle rather than a stomping slap, and so on.
So, much of this research has assured me that we’re on the right track in becoming more bonoboesque humans, in spite of Trump, Putin, Musk and other throwbacks. I’m hoping that even the USA will have a female President some time in the 21st century, and if they progress even further along the bonobo line, they might scrap their worthless semi-monarchical Presidential system altogether…
Okay, maybe in the 22nd century…
Sorry, never really got round to the sex.
References