From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Sun Jul 23 2000 - 20:47:13 MDT
phil osborn wrote:
> You know, there is a wealth of literature - the Bible, the tale of
> Gilgamesh, the Shah Nama, etc., which describes individuals living for
> centuries, followed by a slowly declining lifespan leveling out where we are
> now. Of course, it is possible and even likely that this is just mythology.
> But not likely enough to totally discount...
I can imagine a mechanism whereby such accounts would have gotten
recorded: as the stories and legends were passed down verbally thru the ages
each generation perceived the fathers and grandfathers as much older
than the teller perceived himself, even when the teller reached the same
age the ancestor was at his passing. For that reason, since the teller
knows his own age but is unsure of the age of the ancestor, he would
simply add ten or twenty years, or perhaps fifty. The process is repeated
until the advent of writing, and you end up with 900+ year lifespans. spike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:30:08 MST