The many ways of growing old: aging, activity patterns, and function in modern foragers

As the proportion of older adults increases in populations around the world, understanding human aging has become essential to public health research. Several elements of lifestyle, including physical activity (PA) patterns, appear to play important roles in shaping human health throughout life and older adulthood. Most of our understanding of how we age, though, stems from work with people living in industrialized populations, who do not represent the diversity of modern human lifestyles. In this dissertation, I examine elements of lifestyle and functional aging in the Hadza, a modern foraging population in Tanzania, known for their high lifelong PA engagement. While most work with Hadza foragers has focused on those who live in remote ?bush? camps who continue to forage on a full-time basis, most Hadza are more settled and engage in a variety of subsistence activities and wage labor. This dissertation tests the hypothesis that within the Hadza community, engaging in traditional foraging activities is associated with a distinctive PA profile that benefits functional aging. To test this hypothesis, I compare patterns of PA and functional aging among Hadza engaged in variable amounts of foraging. I found no consistent differences in patterns of PA or functional aging among Hadza engaged in different amounts of foraging. Furthermore, age was negatively associated with most measures of physical and cognitive function for participants. This dissertation contributes to a broader understanding of variation in human aging by examining how humans in a modern foraging context experience growing older.