Ageing, metabolomics and palaeoanthropology: What can the fields learn from each other?

Growing old is the major risk factor for hundreds of distinct conditions. Thus, ageing of the global population will pose major social, medical, and economic challenges unless this ill health can be ameliorated or reversed. Accordingly, it is increasingly clear that cross-disciplinary approaches to understanding ageing, although not essential, allow collaborative teams to develop new methodologies which can accelerate translation of research into interventions. Co-creation of new concepts and technologies also brings reciprocal benefits to the individual disciplines involved. The evolution of human ageing is a case in point. Whilst there is broad consensus concerning the process and factors shaping the evolution of ageing in general their relative contributions to the evolution of human ageing remain less clear. This is due to three distinct factors. The extended genetic bottlenecks to which H. sapiens was exposed until the termination of the last ice age which sharply distinguishes our species from almost all current ageing models. Sociality, which humans share with many, but not all, living primate species; and finally, an extended post reproductive menopausal period which is extremely rare in the biosphere and uniquely long in humans. Accordingly, a symposium on the physiology and demography of early human evolution was organised by the authors at which palaeodemographers, archaeologists, population biologists and geroscientists discussed human ageing. This has generated important interdisciplinary research priorities which could accelerate the development of treatments for older people in the present and transform key aspects of our understanding of the ageing process in the past.