I copy my reply here from the wisdom teeth thread, because this topic deserves its own thread: That is debatable and we just don't know. If the oldest person is 122 now and 1000 years ago it was 105 that is still almost 20% increase, but I agree with Fraggle that those are statistical outliers, we should look at groups instead of individuals.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_life_span#In_humans It would be better to look at the 10 or 50 oldest persons in a decade or century, and average their ages of death and see if there is a statistically valid difference... The problem is that before the 18th century it is pretty much impossible to verify a person's both birhday and day of death, when the person is over 100 years old... It could be argued though that people 1-2000 years ago geneticly were able to live just as long as now, but other circumstances shortened their lifes....
As you say yourself, very hard to answer to your title question with no evidence. Now, if we were to use the Old Testament as evidence, it seems maximum lifespan has decreased Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Hang on a minute - the age which someone lives to and the maximum age that they could possibly live to are 2 different things - so comparing ages of death is irrelevant. Using this method, the only useful test groups would be individuals who only died of old age (is there such a thing?) and had never had any medical conditions that could potentially shorten their lifespan. Inadequate medical records notwithstanding, this would leave us with such a small sample size that any statistical result would be as likely to be an artefact of small sample size as anything else. The only way I can think of to test the hypothesis would be to collect genetic material from as many newborns as possible from previous centuries and compare the lengths of their telomeres - as we know these have something to do with ageing and therefore presumably maximum possible lifespan.
Well, can't we tell at what age a person died? We do have quite a few skeletons, so as long as we don't find one with a 120+ possible death date, we have to assume that the max. lifespan might have increased a bit. I agree that the sample size is small, but we have to work what we have, not what we wish... Anyway, I wasn't even interested about the max. lifespan but about the fact that ancient people didn't live up to that old age as old people do nowadays...