A study of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries suggests two seemingly timeless truths: Some people reach advanced ages likely due to good genes and biological factors, and women tend to live longer than men.
Information on human longevity in the historical record represents two extremes. On the one hand, there are the extreme claims in religion and myths: Methuselah in the Hebrew Bible supposedly lived to be 969 years old, early Christians indicated that Saint Servatius was 375, and a tombstone in the United Kingdom claims that a man named William Edwards died at age 168.
On the other extreme, there is the long-standing belief that people who lived in ancient times — before the advent of modern medicine and other conveniences — hardly ever reached advanced ages. As English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) wrote, "the life of man" is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."