
Supercentenarians are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates - lordnacho
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1
======
btilly
I am reminded of [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/study-questions-
ag...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/study-questions-age-worlds-
oldest-woman-180971153/) which lays out the case that the oldest woman on
record, Jeanne Calment, was actually her daughter Yvonne who substituted
herself for her mother in 1934 to avoid inheritance taxes.

~~~
gwern
Yes, there's an interesting philosophical question here about burdens of proof
and Humean 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'. Calment's
claim is to be the oldest person out of billions of people, and she is the
oldest by a truly extraordinary margin - no one has even come close to
reaching her record before or since. So, which is more likely: that her claim
however improbable ( _someone_ has to win the lottery) is completely correct
(and she simply had some unique luck or mutation enabling her excess
longevity), or that some highly unusual (but still more likely than '1 in tens
of billions') circumstance (such as a complicated tax & insurance fraud) has
led to a mistake? Indeed, how would one ever be sure of such a claim, short of
the isotopic testing advocated in OP - which will, incidentally, stop working
in the future?

(This is a general problem of priors and evidence and model uncertainty I
think about occasionally:
[https://www.gwern.net/Modus](https://www.gwern.net/Modus)
[https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood](https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood)
[https://www.gwern.net/Mail-delivery#on-model-
uncertainty](https://www.gwern.net/Mail-delivery#on-model-uncertainty)
[https://www.gwern.net/Research-criticism](https://www.gwern.net/Research-
criticism)
[https://www.gwern.net/Everything](https://www.gwern.net/Everything)
[https://www.gwern.net/Turing-complete#on-seeing-through-
and-...](https://www.gwern.net/Turing-complete#on-seeing-through-and-unseeing)
)

~~~
CommieBobDole
I really wouldn't say "nobody has come close" \- she was 3 years older (122 vs
119) than the next oldest verified person, and around five years from most of
the next top ten - most of them died at 117.

If she was, say, 132, I'd be more suspicious, but 122 sounds more reasonable
for statistical outliers in an incredibly complex process.

~~~
gwern
The problem is, 3 years is a huge gap. If you look at all the other
centenarians, they really do cluster within months of 117-119. And then you
have Calment, who is the only outlier and who is like 30+ months past them all
(and this is at a time of life where the annual mortality rate is like >50%).
I plotted the age gap between the record holders once, and it looks basically
like a flat line and then a single dot at the top of the graph corresponding
to Calment. It may be a complex process, but at least for everyone _else_ they
die on schedule.

~~~
xamuel
It's also worth pointing out that all the Abrahamic religions predict a
120-year limit, which prediction dates back thousands of years (Genesis 6:3).
So regardless of your opinion of Abrahamic religions, there are a lot of
people who would care a great deal about verifying those extra three years!

~~~
mrsuprawsm
>all the Abrahamic religions predict a 120-year limit

Do you have any more information on this? It sounds like interesting reading,
but all I can find on Google is a link to this post.

~~~
Jabbles
[https://www.versebyverseministry.org/bible-answers/are-
peopl...](https://www.versebyverseministry.org/bible-answers/are-people-
limited-to-120-years-of-life)

from
[https://www.google.com/search?q=bible+120+year+age+limit](https://www.google.com/search?q=bible+120+year+age+limit)

------
Animats
A few years ago, the government of Japan decided to have people visit everyone
over the age of 100, to see how they were getting along and what they were
doing right.[1] They found 231 cases where pensions were being paid out but
the person could not be found.

[1]
[https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/world/asia/15japan.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/world/asia/15japan.html)

~~~
mikekchar
Thanks for finding that link! I saw this on the news at the time and I've
never been able to find something in English to talk about it. One of things
that shook out from this is that they redid the longevity studies in Okinawa
and discovered that people in Okinawa have the same life expectancy as
everyone else in Japan (which is not much different than the rest of the
world). All of those nutrition studies in the 70's were based on government
census data -- which turned out to be massive pension fraud.

------
mktmkr
There is also the reverse process: people who are older than officially
recorded. When my in-laws came to the USA from Vietnam after the war they
wanted to be able to work for a long time before anyone forced the to retire,
so they just said they were 25 years old, an understatement of quite a number
of years. Upheaval and displacement tend to wipe out government records.

~~~
dev_dull
> _When my in-laws came to the USA from Vietnam after the war they wanted to
> be able to work for a long time before anyone forced the to retire, so they
> just said they were 25 years old_

God bless your parents. I don’t care much for the immigration debate in our
country, but we should be actively recruiting people like this.

~~~
chachachoney
>> I don’t care much for the immigration debate in our country, but we should
be actively recruiting people like this.

Just to be clear, you're indicating that the criteria we should be selecting
for is people willing to falsify information on official documents.

~~~
nostrademons
I think what he was getting at is that we should be selecting for people
willing to work hard for long periods of time.

I also suspect that if you posed a force-choice question to most Americans,
"Who would you rather have in this country: people who are willing to falsify
official documents so they can work hard for longer, or people who stick to
the letter of the law so that they can work as little as possible?", they
would choose the former.

~~~
chachachoney
The criteria mentioned seem both parochial and specious.

I'd prefer meaningful criteria that result in new citizens who would make
positive contributions to a community, not criteria that would encourage
otherwise ethical people to falsify official documents nor ones that equate
toil with virtue.

------
chewz
> Thousands of Japanese centenarians may have died decades ago

> The justice ministry said the survey found that more than 77,000 people
> listed as still alive in local government records would have to be aged at
> least 120, and 884 would be 150 or older.

> The nationwide survey was launched in August after police discovered the
> mummified corpse of Sogen Kato, who at 111 was listed as Tokyo's oldest man,
> in his family home 32 years after his death.

> Kato's granddaughter has been arrested on suspicion of abandoning his body
> and receiving millions of yen in pension payments after his unreported
> death.

> Soon after came the discovery that a 113-year-old woman listed as Tokyo's
> oldest resident had not been seen by her family for more than 20 years.
> Welfare officials have yet to locate Fusa Furuya, who was last seen in about
> 1986.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20627021](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20627021)

~~~
glandium
> 884 would be 150 or older.

It is kind of disturbing that these people are officially thought to be that
age, but that nobody had been looking them up before despite them literally,
albeit theoretically, being the oldest people alive on Earth!

~~~
aitchnyu
Winston Churchill had special shipments of cigars from India with associated
paperwork. The paperwork persisted a few decades after Indian independence and
his death. Depending on data keeping, it will take a crackdown to find
suspicious pensioners.

------
JohnJamesRambo
Boy this may change some recommendations about the “blue zone” diets and
lifestyles.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone)

~~~
hombre_fatal
I doubt that:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone#Characteristics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone#Characteristics)

Pretty standard, unanimous lifestyle advice. Stay social, stay active, not too
much alcohol, lots of plants, avoid stress, don't smoke.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
How much of those are based on erroneous correlations based on blue zone data
though?

>In his book, Buettner provides a list of nine lessons, covering the lifestyle
of blue zones people:[13]

>Moderate, regular physical activity.

>Life purpose.

>Stress reduction.

>Moderate caloric intake.

>Plant-based diet.

>Moderate alcohol intake, especially wine.

>Engagement in spirituality or religion.

>Engagement in family life.

>Engagement in social life.

We don't know which ones of those are real and which signify you live in a
zone which has bad records for birth certificates.

~~~
simonsarris
Also what does "high vegetable intake" or "Plant-based diet" mean? These can
mean wildly different things to different people.

For example, how many people over 100 are lifelong vegetarians? Vegans? I bet
the number is extremely small (or zero in the case of vegans, a term coined in
1944), but that's what many people think of when one says "plant-based diet".

~~~
perl4ever
Plant based diet?

Well, that means lots of HFCS and starch, fried in vegetable oil, of course.

------
opportune
Note that the introduction of birth certificates in the US only reduced
supercentarians, it didn’t eliminate them.

I would be willing to accept that most are frauds, but I do think it is
possible for someone to live to be a supercentarian. I have met a couple
people who are around 100 who seemed healthy and had it all together mentally.
I’m sure some decent percent of people in that position have the ability to
live for another 10 years

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Of course, but that isn't what this study is about or why it (and other's like
it) are important.

Researchers have spent tons of time trying to discover why certain areas are
ripe with supercentenarians - what is it about their diet or environment or
genetics or social structure. As a random person in the US, I have
particularly heard about Okinawa in this regard.

This study is strongly implying that the only thing special about those areas
is their ability and desire to commit fraud.

------
kranner
When the grandmother of, let’s say a friend, passed away at 96, I was
surprised to note the local newspaper mention her age as 106, no doubt due to
the political influence of said friend’s relatives. I didn’t realise at the
time that this is a sort of thing people like to brag about.

~~~
jfk13
You don't think it was simply an arithmetic mistake by the editor of the local
deaths column? Given a birth date of 19xx and a death date of 20xx, an off-
by-10 error doesn't sound too far-fetched.

~~~
kranner
The family didn’t know her date of birth. They had an estimate of her year of
birth because she’d said she was x years old when her first child was born.

------
pieter_mj
I guess i'm gonna start planning moving to a no-birth-certificate region.
Hoping the somewhat late move will still have a positive effect on my life-
and healthspan.

~~~
tracker1
Avoiding refined sugars and grains will go a very long way towards this, which
is likely a large part of the longer lived combined with modern medicine
availability.

~~~
pkaye
Right now the data is correlating better with no-birth-certificate regions so
I'll follow the data.

~~~
bduerst
Looks like the Antarctica continent has a large ratio of those regions. Time
to pack the bags.

------
dreamcompiler
I've wondered about this for a long time. Finally somebody investigated, and
lo and behold, a good chunk of this phenomenon is simply the result of lying.

~~~
thaumasiotes
[https://dilbert.com/strip/2013-03-07](https://dilbert.com/strip/2013-03-07)

------
Merrill
Odd, since a birth certificate is not actually a valid proof of identity.

There is no biometric associated with a birth certificate created in year X
that can be used to prove that the baby named in it has grown up to become the
person claiming that identity in year Y.

An actual background check has to establish a chain of evidence linking the
birth to the person being checked. This requires interviewing relatives,
friends and acquaintances, collecting school and business records, drivers
license records and any other public or private records.

~~~
jobigoud
> This requires interviewing relatives, friends and acquaintances, collecting
> school and business records, drivers license records and any other public or
> private records.

We are talking about people born before 1910 here. Friends and acquaintances
are all dead by definition. Drivers license won't come into play for decades.
Other mid-life documents like marriage are also going to be decades later.

It's a hard problem. Especially when identity fraud for other reasons may be
involved (a chield taking the identity of a parent to bypass inheritance
taxes).

We need a biological test. Is there a biological marker that can attest of
someone's age?

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
> Is there a biological marker that can attest of someone's age?

No, especially when you'd expect that the same qualities that might allow
someone to live a very long time would also make them appear "biologically"
younger. We don't have rings like trees.

------
gpderetta
While I've also congettured in the past that at least a good chunk of extreme
supercentenarians are due to anagraphical errors if not outright fraud, I do
not think that the paper support the thesis well.

For starter they do not have a global model, it seems that they handpicked
different statistics for different areas that support their thesis (they do
not even show anything concrete for Japan).

Regarding Sardinia, their numbers seem actually wrong: looking at the raw
Istat data the numbers for 55 year life expectancy for the Sardinian provinces
seem in line with the rest of Italy (95-96%) putting Sardinia somewhere in the
middle of the (quite tight) Italian distribution.

It is possible that the researcher averaged the data over a longer period of
time that I bothered to look is possible, but the paper doesn't discuss the
methodology.

Their fitting, p value not withstanding, also seem a bit adventurous; the fact
that all and almost only Sardinian provinces are extrme outliers shoud have
been a tell. The rest of the Italian bprovinces are in a tight uniform
cluster.

Sardinia, except for a very brief period in the mid 2010s,has only 4
provinces, so it is possible that messed up their data extraction (they show 8
provinces).

Also Sardinia is not particularly poorer than the rest of Southern Italy and
actually has a lower crime rate (which they suggest but not outright state is
a factor).

A better paper would probably try to build a single model for Japan, Italy and
US using actual mortality, crime and poverty rates.

------
howard941
Did anyone pull the full study? Does it come out and take the
supercentenarian-ship claimants to task for lack of probity?

~~~
crazygringo
It explicitly mentions pension fraud -- who wouldn't want to retire a little
earlier?

> _The hypothesis that these relatively low literacy rates and incomes are
> generating age-reporting errors and pension fraud, and therefore remarkable
> age records, seems overlooked. ..._

> _This issue presents a substantial problem for remarkable-age databases,
> embodied in a deliberately provocative, if seemingly absurd, hypothesis:_

> _Every ‘supercentenarian’ is an accidental or intentional identity thief,
> who owns real and validated 110+ year-old documents, and is passably good at
> their job._

~~~
simias
Interestingly the holder of the record for oldest human being remains Jeanne
Calment and there's a lot of evidence for her record. Wikipedia mentions a
theory that her daughter might have assumed her identity in the 1930's[1] but
it doesn't appear very credible.

So I guess it _is_ possible to live that old, just extremely unlikely.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Scepticism_rega...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Scepticism_regarding_age)

~~~
gamblor956
There's a very detailed analysis of Calment showing that it is most likely
that the daughter replaced the mother, since the facial features of Jeanne
Calment as a middle-aged or elderly woman don't match her earlier photos at
all...but are a splitting image of her daughter's facial features.

Also, a lot of her photos feature her wearing clothes that were not in style
at the ages she appears to be in the photos--but would have been right for her
daughter.

And there's the bit where she keeps calling her putative husband her father...

And finally it's just plain weird that her son-in-law (i.e., her daughter's
husband) moved in with her after her daughter's supposed death and lived with
her in a common-law relationship for decades. But it makes perfect sense if it
was actually just the daughter assuming her mom's identity for tax evasion
purposes.

~~~
simias
I replied to this in a similar comment above, I disagree that this analysis is
very detailed, or at least that it's more detailed than the evidence _in
favor_ of Jeanne being who she claims to be.

I looked at the picture comparisons, it's not like they had 20Megapixel HDR
cameras back then, the quality is not great. Besides only a handful of
pictures exist, with a lot of variations in lighting and exposition. It's
possible that it's true, but it's not exactly overwhelming evidence in my
opinion.

>And finally it's just plain weird that her son-in-law (i.e., her daughter's
husband) moved in with her after her daughter's supposed death and lived with
her in a common-law relationship for decades.

Wikipedia says: "By the 1954 census, she was still registered in the same
apartment, together with her son-in-law, retired Colonel Billot, Yvonne's
widower; the census documents list Jeanne as "mother" in 1954 and "widow" in
1962. Frédéric Billot lived next door with his wife Renée."

Doesn't make it sound quite as weird as you make it out to be.

~~~
gamblor956
_Wikipedia says: "By the 1954 census, she was still registered in the same
apartment, together with her son-in-law, retired Colonel Billot, Yvonne's
widower; the census documents list Jeanne as "mother" in 1954 and "widow" in
1962. Frédéric Billot lived next door with his wife Renée."

Doesn't make it sound quite as weird as you make it out to be._

That is extremely weird, and the simplest and most logical explanation is that
Yvonne was committing estate tax fraud to avoid a ruinous tax on her
inheritance of the family store.

 _Besides only a handful of pictures exist, with a lot of variations in
lighting and exposition. It 's possible that it's true, but it's not exactly
overwhelming evidence in my opinion._

Yes, but pictures of the _two_ of them are available and the older pictures of
Jeanne clearly match the younger pictures of Yvonne. Jeanne would have needed
to have had face surgery or some serious facial structural changes to have the
face she did in her old age. The simplest explanation, again, is that Jeanne
died young(ish) and Yvonne pretended to be her.

And again, this also explains why for decades, despite otherwise being sound
of mind and coherent, she kept referring to her husband as her father in
casual conversation.

------
JoeAltmaier
Easiest way to live past 100? Just say you did. 2nd easiest: use your
grandfather's birth certificate.

------
Finnucane
Man, I must be old--the first thing to come to mind was the Dannon yogurt ads
from the 1970s with the old people of Soviet Georgia. And, at the time, Dannon
actually caught some flack because there was no documentation of how old these
people really were.

~~~
lucas_membrane
Do not condemn those people as liars or frauds. They did what any sensible
person would have done, avoided death by conscription during the Great War by
assuming the identities of their older cousins, brothers, uncles and fathers.

~~~
Finnucane
Probably some of them didn’t really know for sure.

------
wavefunction
Dealing with my somewhat prematurely elderly father of 73 and his issues (my
gps all lived relatively heartily into their 80 and 90s) I have to conclude my
options in a few decades will be self-limited to driving my car off a cliff if
I can't upload myself into a robot husk.

What I'm saying is that supercentenarianism seems heavily overrated.

~~~
gwern
If you are in bad shape at 73, you are probably not going to make it to 100.
This is called 'compression of morbidity'. As people age better, the period of
disability & lower quality of life shrinks, so you tend to live longer in good
health but then once something goes wrong, you'll be dead quickly. A lot of
centenarians are pretty active, even driving cars, until months or weeks
before they die (and they may simply die in their sleep unexpectedly). It's
the people who are in bad health in their 50s or 60s who can look forward to
decades of expensive & painful ill health before they finally die... In any
case, most centenarians I've seen interviewed seem happy to be alive, and
don't wish for the sweet mercy of oblivion, so I am happy to take them at
their word that they find their life worth living.

~~~
wavefunction
Most definitely, my father has recently been falling which is understandable
with his Parkinson's but concerning as it is a recent development. My mother
is exhibiting far more vitality and will probably outdo my gps as they all
lived relatively unhealthy mid-Century American lives but into their 80s and
90s.

------
wirrbel
> relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of
> centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud
> and error in generating remarkable human age records

So I think for lack of birth certificates I can imagine the underlying process
of unregistered people not being aware about their true age.

The claim that high poverty and crime rates produce such fraud feels
prejudiced. also why would Sardinia be different in that regard compared to
Sicily or poor regions on the Italian mainland?

Also I would be interested in how many hypothesis these researches tested on
the data set and on whether they performed proper adjustments of thresholds
(bonferroni correction)

~~~
rconti
As far as I know, all of these records are maintained at the comune[1] level
in Italy, so high crime/corruption in one comume might manifest itself
differently from how it does in another comune.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comune)

------
golemotron
> Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria
> corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and
> short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative
> poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian
> and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error
> in generating remarkable human age records.

Or, bureaucracy kills.

------
dwd
I think the point is that any dietary or lifestyle recommendations to achieve
a long life need to be reassessed.

Do recommendations to reduce intake or intermittent fasting rely on unverified
population ages?

My personal take on living long is to get regular health checkups and seek
medical care early if there are any issues.

What do people like Queen Elizabeth, Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch do to
remain healthy and still working at their age?

------
raverbashing
Interesting enough, the article doesn't mention that in a lot of places (and
possibly a bit too long ago for any of those to be affected), baptismal
certificates substituted for birth certificates

Sure, there might have been some time difference between date of birth from
date of baptism, but it was usually short enough (even if it might have been a
couple of years)

~~~
jobigoud
But surely you are baptised after you are born so it would skew the data in
the other direction.

------
SomewhatLikely
Another explanation could be that all the young people have moved away from
the poorest areas and older people stayed and kept getting older. It depends
if they are dividing supercentenarian population by today's population or by
the area's population when they were born.

------
rumcajz
One thing I heard (not sure whether it's true) is that in Ottoman empire, when
I child died, parents often used the his or her birth certificate for the next
child. That way they could avoid all the associated paperwork.

------
crimsonalucard
>Instead of prompting skepticism, under the relatively safe assumption that
smoking, drinking, poverty, and illiteracy should not enrich for remarkable
longevity records, these contra-indications of survival are routinely ignored.
In contrast, it could be suggested that the abundance of supercentenarians in
these regions reflect high rates of undetected error.

One bluezone is loma linda, california. Why was this not factored in this
study. I find this study to be quite biased as well.

------
mcculley
I found suspicious data when looking at voter records:
[https://enki.org/2018/12/07/finding-unusual-
voters/](https://enki.org/2018/12/07/finding-unusual-voters/)
[https://quark.cards/voters/Florida/oldest](https://quark.cards/voters/Florida/oldest)

------
mandelbrotwurst
Proof that bureaucracy kills!

------
sebringj
Elephant in the room...no birth certificates.

~~~
dvduval
I also have been thinking of ways that I can extend my life. I'm not sure this
is what I'm looking for. Perhaps a therapy animal such as a dog or a cat... It
seems like the probability of an accident occurring with an elephant in the
room would be very high, and only a small percentage of people would live past
a hundred.

~~~
StavrosK
Just claim you were born years earlier, tada!

~~~
sebringj
How old was this guy?... man he was so old, it was before written history.
well then, he must be a centenarian then. for sure.

------
sandworm101
The lawyer in me suggests removing that comment asap. Lying on immigration
forms, no matter the reason or timeline, can be a big deal. The US recently
setup a "denaturalization task force" to look for technical reasons to
deny/deport and generally be evil towards immigrants who have done things like
lie on immigration forms. But maybe you really hate your in-laws.

"A United States Citizenship and Immigration Services team in Los Angeles has
been reviewing more than 2,500 naturalization files for possible
denaturalization, focusing on identity fraud and willful misrepresentation.
More than 100 cases have been referred to the Department of Justice for
possible action." (2018)

[https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-
denaturali...](https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-
denaturalization-20180812-story.html)

~~~
marpstar
I see your point, but are there records to verify his claim? If not, what's
the government going to do?

~~~
_jal
Oh, I dunno, lock people up and/or deport them anyway?

[https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens-
ice-20180...](https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens-
ice-20180427-htmlstory.html)

------
supernova87a
Homer: "Oh Lisa! There's no record of a hurricane ever hitting Springfield."

Lisa: "Yes, but the records only go back to 1978 when the Hall of Records was
mysteriously blown away!"

------
wnevets
I guess that means the secret to a long life is the lack of government
paperwork.

~~~
C1sc0cat
Bet they claimed there benefits _nudge_ _nudge_ _wink_

Sorry to be cynical.

~~~
cabaalis
It's odd you're down voted when other comments in this page say they did
exactly what you're implying.

~~~
ggggtez
I'd rather people said what they mean, instead of trying to be witty. Also
typos.

~~~
C1sc0cat
Aww diddums

------
brzezmac
so it's time for Carbon-14 then ...

~~~
jerf
Carbon-14 datings works because once an organism dies, it stops exchanging
carbon with its environment, so C14 stops coming in. Carbon dating any living
organism will come back with "it died 0 years ago/hasn't died yet", give or
take whatever details make it more complicated in reality than it is in
theory, as it always is.

~~~
iguy
Is there any dead carbon, like perhaps in the teeth? Have never heard of it
being done, but would be neat.

~~~
3JPLW
Apparently it is possible to do radiocarbon dating on tooth enamel. Enamel
contains 0.4% carbon and is indeed frozen at time of development.
Unfortunately, we're limited to post-nuclear testing because without the
atmospheric diffusion C14 has very low precision due to the half-life of 5730
years.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2957015/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2957015/)

[https://www.nature.com/articles/437333a](https://www.nature.com/articles/437333a)

~~~
iguy
Thanks! That's interesting, to use the post-nuclear curve as a modern clock,
instead of using C14's half life for an ancient clock. For a given tooth they
seem to assume all enamel was from one date, during childhood.

------
trumbitta2
I live in Sardinia. We have both birth certificates and supercentenarians.

~~~
tyre
From the first paragraph of the abstract:

> In Italy, which has more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is
> instead predicted by low per capita incomes and a short life expectancy.

> Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria
> corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and
> short life expectancy relative to their national average.

~~~
socialist_coder
I didn't really understand what the point was there - are they saying it's
because of fraud? Or a real thing?

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guan
I think they are implying that it could be fraud, but since there are birth
certificates available, you couldn’t commit this fraud by simply making up a
birth date. So a fraudulent supercentenarian would likely have assumed the
identity of someone older, perhaps to claim a pension earlier.

As for the correlations, low incomes would provide a motive for age pension
fraud. Short life expectancy being correlated with more supercentenarians
suggests it’s not because people in those areas are naturally healthier.

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tracker1
I would guess the biggest factors are very limited consumption of heavily
refined foods (in particular sugar and refined grains) as well as some access
to modern medicine (antibiotics, hospital births).

edit: And, of course, there's a lot of fraud cases.

