A new preprint has taken an unusual route to an old question: not “How long did ancient humans live?”, but “How long could they live?” Using epigenetic “clocks” that read age-related patterns in DNA methylation, researchers estimate modern humans may have a far higher biological ceiling than our extinct cousins, Neanderthals and Denisovans. If their calculations hold up, a longer human lifespan may be a late-evolving feature of Homo sapiens, not something we inherited from earlier branches
The work, pre-printed in Research Square, but currently not peer-reviewed, also nods to a separate debate: even if the body allows extreme longevity, does modern life - stress, disease, inequality, and environment - actually let many people reach it? That tension sits at the heart of today’s “limits of lifespan” arguments.
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Reading Lifespan in DNA Methylation (“Epigenetic Clocks”)
The study team (based at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, among other institutions) compiled 15,283 methylation samples from people aged 0 to 114, including 219 samples from people over 90. They ran 16 methylation clocks across multiple tissues to estimate a theoretical upper boundary for the modern human lifespan.
Epigenetic clocks are widely used to estimate biological age, but the authors are careful about the caveats: clock accuracy can slip at extreme ages, and different tissues don’t “age” at identical rates. Still, by comparing multiple approaches rather than leaning on a single clock, they argue their estimate is at least a plausible range for a biological ceiling.
Neanderthal reconstruction at MUSE (Museo delle Scienze), Trento. (Matteo De Stefano/MUSE/ CC BY-SA 3.0
A 128–202 Year Ceiling for the Modern Human Lifespan?
Across their modelling strategies, the authors place the theoretical upper limit of the modern human lifespan somewhere between 128 and 202 years. They also note the best-verified maximum recorded lifespan remains 122.493 years (Jeanne Calment’s famous record) so their ceiling is not presented as “normal” longevity, but as an extreme boundary.
That distinction is important because demographers and biologists still disagree over whether human longevity is nearing a hard cap or simply approaching a region where further gains become rare and statistically slow. A 2022 study in Nature lays out how much of this fight comes down to tiny datasets of supercentenarians and thorny questions about record verification.
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Neanderthal reconstruction model at the Natural History Museum, London. (Werner Ustorf/CC BY-SA 2.0)
What This Could Mean for Neanderthals and Denisovans
The same methylation-clock logic was then applied to reconstructed methylation maps from an Altai Neanderthal and a Denisovan. The estimated lifespan ranges were 38.2–64.5 years for Neanderthals and 40.0–69.8 years for Denisovans, roughly “two decades longer” than some fossil-based expectations, but still well below the modern human ceiling proposed in the paper.
The authors argue this gap hints that substantially extended longevity is a derived trait in the modern human lineage, emerging after the split from these archaic relatives. That doesn’t mean older Neanderthals or Denisovans were impossible, only that the biology for routinely pushing the upper edge may not have been there in the same way.
Why We Rarely “Meet” the Elderly in Deep Time
Even if archaic humans could occasionally reach late adulthood, surviving long enough to look “old” in the fossil record is a different problem. Ancient life was hazardous, and as Ancient Origins has explored, low life expectancy at birth often reflects high childhood mortality, not an iron rule that adults died at 30 or 35.
For Neanderthals, developmental and mortality patterns likely shaped what ages were common on the landscape, and therefore what ages are likely to be preserved and found. Another study covered by Ancient Origins suggest faster childhood development, which may be tied to the pressures of life in the Pleistocene.
Top image: An elderly human. Source: Saltov/Adobe Stock
By Gary Manners
References
Taub, B. 2026. Do Modern Humans Have A Longer Lifespan Than Neanderthals And Denisovans? Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/do-modern-humans-have-a-longer-lifespan-than-neanderthals-and-denisovans-82583
Liu, X. et al. n.d. Epigenetic estimates reveal a species-specific extension of lifespan in modern humans. Available at: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8101134/v1
Eisenstein, M., 2022. Does the human lifespan have a limit? Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00070-1
Robine, J.-M. 2019. The Real Facts Supporting Jeanne Calment as the Oldest Ever Human. Available at: https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/74/Supplement_1/S13/5569844
