Centenarians are masters of survival – they successfully go through all trials of life. They don’t usually have perfect lives – they’ve been through good times and bad times. Many centenarians that I met in my medical practice have been war prisoners for many years. They survived their lifetime partner and sometimes their children too. They did not excel through their formal education, yet they have learnt a lot of skills on the side. Many of them are still curious about the world around them, still make new friends and read the newspapers.
When asked how they managed to reach 100, many of them answer that they simply lived day after day. Is it that simple?
Lately I found an old BBC documentary by David Attenborough which presented in a vivid way how other species need to pass through all these trials to survive and leave a legacy behind. You can only take it step by step.
1 ) Arriving
A long journey starts with the first step. A long life starts with coming to life in the first place. In the case of humans, two people must meet up, be able to attract each other and create a new form of life which in the right conditions is able to survive while dependent on one’s mother.
2) Growing up
Once alive and separated by its mother, a baby needs more or less attention depending on its species. We as well as baby primates and elephants enjoy many years of care during which our brain evolves and learns crucial skills of survival. On the other hand, fish start their childhood fending for themselves, and so do turtles and many others.
3) Finding food
Whatever your diet, being skillful in what is edible, what is not and how to get it takes time and practice to learn. Vegetarians don’t have it any easier, since plants don’t enjoy being eaten and sometimes killed, just like animals do, and they develop many defenses like thorns and poisons to deter other creatures from attacking them.
4) Hunting and escaping
While being busy getting your food, you could become food for someone else. Because of our developed brains, shopping for food has become a relaxing thing to do for most people – worrying about prices is nothing compared to risking your life every time you are out hunting – like penguins do when they go out for fish.
5) Finding the way
Being able to navigate is crucial for escaping predators and sometimes for reaching greener pastures after many months of migration.Most species don’t have our luxury of carrying maps and GPS devices with them – they need to store mental maps of their environment.
6) Home making
The environment out there can be hostile, so making it more predictable and controllable through building up a barrier is a successful strategy used by many animals, not just humans.
Bivalves and snails build their shelters layer by layer with minerals ingested as food from their surrounding, forming their exoskeletons. When you can’t build a shell yourself, you can steal it – and that’s just what the hermit crab is doing. Since it is continuously growing, these tenants need to switch houses periodically and fights regularly take place.
Other animals like prairie dogs dig a hole and call it home.
Many building materials are used in the natural world:
-spider webs made of silk
-nests made by stitching leaves with silk – designed and manufactured by the Indian tailor bird
-wood – which can be raw (beavers build impressive real estates by gathering sticks of wood) or processed with saliva, turning it into paper nests by wasps
-wax – carefully manufactured by the bees
-mud, as used by the potter wasps and the termites
7) Living together
For individuals living in communities, there is a whole new set of challenges one must overcome in order to survive and thrive. Just like in the human world, animal societies form hierarchies and sometimes immutable castes – like the social insects do: termites, ants, bees and wasps. Many animals and plants live in thriving examples of symbiosis, periodically cleaning parasites in exchange of some easily accessible food. Humans have taken the gift of exchange to a high degree of complexity, sometimes turning the means to an end, like when they forget that money is a medium of exchange and not something to use for human destruction.
8) Fighting
When resources are especially scarce, animals tend to compete face-to-face for mating partners, food and territory. The most dangerous fights are given among males competing for females – so unlike the cough-potato males of the human species, don’t you think?
9) Friends and Rivals
The best way to get rid of an enemy is to turn it into a friend. Establishing alliances with the right individuals allows animals in a community to thrive together, even if they may indirectly take care of their genes, like adult aunts and uncles who babysit the offspring of the dominant pair.
10) Talking to Strangers
Communication is important not only between members of the same species, but even among non-competing species. Just like some small birds announce the danger of snakes or eagles among themselves, while smart primates learnt to identify these messages and run away in the trees, so are humans helped by other animals in detecting forthcoming earthquakes or other calamities.
11) Courting
In most species it is the male doing the courting. This skill takes practice. Male birds need years to create beautiful and elegant nests or particular steps of dance, beautiful and elegant enough to be chosen by females. They need to repeat the process every spring, while evaluating females just the same.
12) Continuing the Line
Once the individual has gone through all these trials, the reward is passing on its genes to the next generation, where each new individual will need to master the same steps, sometimes in a more challenging environment.Children being born today need to master a higher degree of informational complexity than their grandparents had to. Will they manage to pass on their genes too?
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I think taking things, ‘step-by-step’ instead of always looking at the big picture, is less over whelming and less stressful. This goes for most things in life – I just finished a 8,500km cycle trip. At the start of the trip I could not think about the big picture, or how many kilometers I had left to cycle, I just had to focus on the ‘here and now’ and concentrate on reaching the ‘next step’. Every time I started thinking about the big picture, I got stressed – stress has got to aid in ageing, hasn’t it?
It is easier said than done, to only focus on the ‘next step’ and not the ‘big picture’ and I guess the more developed we humans become, the more things we have to think about and to stress over – like you said, this generation has to master a higher degree of information than the previous generation. Maybe this is the reason why more couples are choosing not to have children, or to have children a lot later in life?