Professor pioneers field of anthropology through research on human life spans, longevity

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Central Michigan University professor Rachel Caspari is known for bringing research innovations to the field of anthropology.

With her curiosity in life spans and human longevity, Caspari has spent much of her time researching the different aspects of humanity including how people live, time periods and demography.

“I’m interested in recent aspects of human evolution,” Caspari said. “What makes modern people modern? What makes us different from Neanderthals?”

Caspari was highlighted in the August edition of the Scientific American for her research on the early lives of humans and the evolution of grandparents.

After reading her research, the magazine contacted Caspari about featuring her in an article to contribute to her studies.

“After publishing on the topic for a while, I was invited to bring all the things I was working on together,” Caspari said.

Gladly accepting, she wrote the article “The Evolution of Grandparents,” discussing the impact of seniors and the relationship between longevity and other advances in technology and art during the time period.

“I’m interested in the things that make us human,” Caspari said. “One of the important things is third-generation relationships. I was curious when in prehistory that occurs, and it turns out it is fairly recently.”

Sang-Hee Lee, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Riverside, shares common interests with Caspari in topics of sociological evolution.

The two have worked together to determine the evolution of longevity by testing fossil tooth samples.

“Her interest and expertise is fossil records and my special interest was figuring out how to get information from records,” Lee said. “We met in this very interesting idea of when did humans start to live long?”

The human lifespan is not natural compared to other animals, Lee said. Anthropologists have often wondered when humans began to first live longer than the natural life span, and there’s no way to study it in a scientific way.

Caspari rejuvenated a method formed in the ’60s and applied fossil records to compare the relationship between the accumulation of tooth structure and age, Lee said.

Karen Rosenberg, chairwoman of the anthropology department at the University of Delaware, has both a personal and professional relationship with Caspari.

In the past, the two have worked to co-author the work, “Why Not the Neandertals?” and have studied the implications of evolution on health and medicine.

It’s difficult to approach the problem of evolution, Rosenberg said. By using data that scientists have had all along but never used, Caspari formulated a way to determine aging techniques by looking at the ratio of old adults to young adults to get a sense of longevity.

“She came up with an imaginative way to address the problem in an elegant way,” Rosenberg said. “It’s really brilliant and innovative to figure out when a large percentage of the population started to live a long time.”

By using this groundbreaking method of research, Caspari was able to get an idea of when humans began living longer lives.

“With time, there were more and more older folks that were in humanity,” Lee said. “There was an especially big jump around 30,000 years ago when old outnumbered young.”

Lee and Caspari noticed that the time period in which humans began to live longer coincided with other things happening in human evolution, such as art and jewelry.

“Something very interesting was going around during that time period that has nothing to do with a new species, but rather a product of biocultural changes that were happening to the world,” Lee said. “It’s a promising line of research.”

With Caspari’s pioneering research and findings, the field of anthropology now has the means to determine when longevity evolved for humans and how this has impacted other aspects of civilization.

“What I think is wonderful about her work is that she is very rigorous,” Rosenberg said. “What she did was an enormous innovation.”