Some stuff is less damning than it sounds for example - "supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on the first of the month and days divisible by five"
One of my parents comes from a poor rural area of Europe where well into the 60s, it was normal to have a "real" birthdate & an "official" birthdate. This was because the government only issued birth certificates in the nearby city, and being poor & rural, it took time to get there by bus, etc.
So I have aunts & uncles with real-official birthdate deltas of up to 2 weeks.
I'd imagine that going back to 1900s or 1880s, when travel was more difficult, who knows. Further, it is possible that the office in some of these areas for registering births was only open certain days of month/week, the further back you go, etc.
Maybe they only went into the city on market days when they had other business, on the first Monday of the following month.
Don't discount superstition and people registering births on nearest special days like saints days, etc.
Some of these abnormalities get lost to time. Many of my family didn't realize they had a real-official birthdate gap until 30+ years later when their mother told them.
My dad is 4 years younger than his age on paper. He had no birth certificate when he was born and when he was finally being put in school, being home schooled so far, was able to answer questions like a 3rd grader. So the school decided to put him in 4th grade and just made up his birth year (dad's family knew the date but that would make him ineligible for 4th grade).
Yup, you read all sorts of stuff about kids graduating college at 18, etc.
I'd imagine the further back you go, the higher the variance between best/worst education level in a given age cohort.. so school officials would just promote kids up a few grades if they were too smart.
When I entered college (this century) they had all the freshman in my orientation group sitting in a lecture hall and the lady doing the "how not to die partying and related stuff" lecture asked if anyone in the ~100 person lecture hall was under 16. One person raised their hand.
Yup. The lady doing the lecture asked this person what month they were born before making it explicit.
Mean for sure but between the 15yo in question being a woman in a college environment and this only happening in front of 1/10th of 1/4th of the undergraduate student body I doubt it was of any practical hindrance.
Rushing through the middle-to-high-school curriculum is easy. Very, very little novel information actually gets taught over the ~200 hours that make up a school course.
Rushing through undergrad is possible if you do nothing but grind homework and study and read.
Grad school requires you to spend hours and hours in a lab, ass-in-seat, doing research. You're no longer competing with beer pong champions. Unless you're an absolute genius at finding the right direction to solving a novel problem, you're not going to get dramatically better results than your peers. And even if you are, you might be unlucky, and end up wasting a lot of time going down the wrong rabbit-hole.
Grad and post doc students are also often at the mercy of Professors and other academics who significantly slow you down even if you are an absolute genius. My professor guided me away from my core interests multiple times towards their interests by not providing the right mentorship even though they could. Then finally I found my calling and finished my thesis, I had to spend months rewriting it again and again even if my findings and the science behind it didn't change. Having to write unnecessarily dense paragraphs was apparently required. (I am not a genius by any means, just sharing what happens in academia)
You're describing grad school in the sciences for doctoral candidates. For other types of graduate education such as master's degree programs in public policy, international relations, or business administration it's totally possible to rush through if you can handle the load and can make the required course schedules line up.
Utility of being fast drops off in grad school. You can be a course master - but then you have to work. Working also means convincing others who are often going to look at a 15 year old skeptically.
I went to high school with a girl who graduated at age 15 or 16. She was only a few months older than me, but was in senior year when I was a freshman. She also graduated college by 19 IIRC. I graduated high school in 2009 so this is not just some pre-WWII phenomenon.
There was less "authority" back then. If you showed up to a school in the 1930s, they'll put you in some class. There won't be any serious paper work, no questions about where you are coming from or if you were residing near the school. The authority was manifested by the teachers/school itself rather than the state.
To give you a better perspective, if you were traveling back then, border control will be the only deciding body of whether you make it or not. Nowadays, you only show up at the border if the "State" has determined that you are admissible. Border control still has a say in the matter but that's power is getting smaller and smaller.
It's a paradox, because while the bureaucracy has increased and ossified, there was a lack of accountability back then. If the teacher of that school decided that you are inadmissible, you are pretty much out of option.
Finally, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia to show you how much things have changed:
> During World War I, European governments introduced border passport requirements for security reasons, and to control the emigration of people with useful skills. These controls remained in place after the war, becoming a standard, though controversial, procedure. British tourists of the 1920s complained, especially about attached photographs and physical descriptions, which they considered led to a "nasty dehumanisation".[19] The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act was passed in 1914, clearly defining the notions of citizenship and creating a booklet form of the passport.
The school didn’t care. They didn’t want him to repeat grades if he already knew everything. They were focussed on his development than arbitrary restrictions around age.
The "elementary/middle/high school" distinction might have been virtual. My grandfather told me that most rural schools in his time, including the one he went to, had several grades in a single room. Occasionally a single room for all students.
For "elementary" grades it would be primarily by function (can read? can write? can count?) rather than age. And it would not be uncommon to have a much older kid from a poor family sit with little kids at the "cannot read" table.
In this setup jumping a grade could be as simple as sitting at the next table. Can read -- go there. Can count -- one more step. Physical development came from carrying water, herding cattle, bringing and splitting firewood, etc. outside of school.
That's a more severe version of what my child had in elementary school. To keep classes the right size, they would have a few 1st grade classes and a few 2nd grade classes and one 1st/2nd shared classroom. Repeat for each of the following years. My child was always put in the younger half of the shared classroom. After 3rd grade the principal invited them join the regular 5th grade class and skip 4th grade altogether.
This arrangement is by design in some teaching styles, like Montessori. Unfortunately the Montessori schools in my area aged out after Elementary, would've loved to keep my daughter in that kind of environment.
In my country (Croatia), post WW2 schools in rural areas were one man band. You had professor / teacher and he was in charge about anything and everything in the school.
Also, note that some (if not majority) of kids were malnourished, so an older child could look like "properly developed" much younger kid.
Those schools existed for two reasons:
a) to teach kids how to read and write and some very basic math
b) find ones with potential and connect them with benefactor to sponsor theirs more advanced education
That’s not what the abstract said. It said “the first of the month and days divisible by five”. So 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30.
Also, human birthdays aren’t evenly distributed. People tend to have sex around holidays and cluster somewhat. Late August through Early October are popular, and April and May less so.
So the statistical significance of the “round number” no doubt exists, but may not be as significant as it sounds to normal modern people in Western society. My grandfather, for example, was reported to the authorities 8 weeks as his country of birth had a poll tax… in his country baptism records are more accurate than civil birth records.
If that's the cause, then you'd expect to see the same patterns in all birth records of people born in 1923 who died, for example at the age of 50 in 1973, as you would in those from the same cohort who are still alive today.
So if you took samples of birth records for people born in 1923 who died in 1953, 1963, 1973... and so on, does the pattern hold? If these patterns of birth records are indeed evidence of fraud, you would expect to see a difference for people born in 1923 who are still "alive" today and those who died last century.
You see similar patterns in many populations with the convergence to even numbers.
Typically, it’s old people struggling with memory or folks who immigrated. In the United States, there are >10,000 jurisdictions issuing vital records, many of which are less than reliable.
Fraud is a strong word and inaccurate connotation. Are people lying about their age to scam pension or other benefits? Sure. But that is just one of many frauds in this area. Folks will fail to report deaths, steal the identities of dead children or any number of things.
What do you think that will tell you? For example it seems to me that people born in more rural area a century ago are both less likely to have accurate birth records, and less likely to have good access to health care. There are probably many other covariates that would need to be controlled for.
She only knew that she was born in the spring in "the year of the big flood" which neither she nor local records could identify.
When we brought her to city hall, the just asked us what birthday she wanted and she picked her favorite number in her favorite month in spring and we guessed a year which was probably +/- 2-3 years correct.
I had a great aunt (died before I was born) who believed her birthday was two months later than it actually was. The date that everyone believed to be her birthday was exactly 9 months after her parents wedding (her real birthday only seven months after).
I had another great aunt (who I did know) whose drivers license said she was ten years younger than she actually was. They just took you at your word without verifying when she got it.
>This was because the government only issued birth certificates in the nearby city, and being poor & rural, it took time to get there by bus, etc.
I guess I don't see the connection.
Why wouldn't it take a week to get the certificate for most people, and why wouldn't the authorities distinguish the birth date from the filing date?
In the US, the sort of birth certificate I have seen - from less than a hundred years ago - has three dates: Born on, Date filed, Date issued. The last two might be the same, but different from "Born on".
People who were born in the 19th century, on the other hand, may not have any documentation at all. I don't know the details, but I remember it being mentioned that nobody knew exactly how old my grandmother was, least of all herself.
I'm not sure it was a matter of transportation or poverty necessarily - just that everything wasn't controlled by documentation back then. Somewhere I think I read that passports weren't a thing until some time in the early 20th century. Maybe it changed because of WWI?
I think the implied missing detail is that there was, or was perceived to be, a requirement to register a birth in a timely manner - currently in the UK there is a requirement to register a birth is within 42 days (6 weeks), but I have in my head that at some point it was two weeks.
Therefore people might be tempted to lie, saying that the babe was born within the registration deadline.
Or it was just that in the time between the birth happening and being registered they forgot the exact date, and either rounded it themselves, or it was done by the official registering the birth due to imprecise data ("When was the baby born?" "Two and a half weeks ago").
Wife's grandma recently died in her mid 90s. No one in the family actually knew how old she was. In many developing nations, such recordkeeping was often oral and unreliable.
This takes the paper at face value and I would suggest the paper is misleading. For example, the paper says...
> However, alternative explanations for the distribution of remarkable age records appear to have been overlooked or downplayed.
After reading through the original blue zones work and this paper, they didn't make a case that alternative explanations were overlooked or downplayed.
For example, when they did the blue zones work they had to spend a lot of time making sure the data was good and many places were dismissed for bad data. This paper puts a lot of focus on bad data. No kidding.
The paper puts a lot of time into covering bad data in the US. But, then doesn't take the time to point out any issues with the US blue zone.
In a place like where Sardinia Italy they call out things like the murder rate being high and a low survivability rate to 55. Except it doesn't look at people in different age groups where "blue zones" tend to be going away as younger generations eat a different diet.
There are levels to the analysis that are missing which makes the conclusions a bit misleading.
Another thing that happens is being born in a place that does birthdays on a lunar calendar, and then immigrating to a place that uses gregorian/solar, and needing to come up with a birthday in the new system.
My grandma, born circa 1900, had a birthday of Feb 14. She loved Valentines Day. The cakes she would make for that day, and other goodies... so good. My mom and I are sure she chose that day. Her parents both died when she was 8-10. Consumption.
This could be ruled out as the explanation by looking at deceased records as well - if people who died around the age of 30 in the 1950s, 40 in the 1960s etc. also all had curiously “round” birthdays then we could chalk up the fraud to poor recordkeeping instead. I’d be kind of surprised if such a coincidence hadn’t been previously noted though, surrounding discussion of the “birthday paradox” for instance.
Did they not allow reported dates in the certificate in the part of the world? Theoretically you could have issued the certificate in April recording the correct date of birth in January
People weren't as concerned with record keeping back then, these things were just gonna grow mold and feed mice in a drawer somewhere unless someone was trying to annul a marriage (for consanguinity) or argue over an inheritance.
Then the modern administrative state sprang up very fast and the generation born in the late 19th or early 20th century was caught in the middle.
And in many areas of Europe the official papers for birth, death and marriage were held by churches for a long time before being taken over by the state.
On the other side of my family, a family member made a records request re: ancestor born say around 1880 and the official government response was that the papers had been at a church long burned down and paperwork lost.
This could describe why birthdays are concentrated on a particular day of the week, but what place would have market days or something similar running on a cadence that consistently falls on days of month divisible by 5?
You're making the odd assumption that the clerk at the counter was able to, or cared enough, to backdate the birth certificate, and that there was an intentional lie, from the parents. This suggests an extreme naivety of the role/important of birth dates, 90 years ago.
yes, thats exactly what I am arguing.
that is - pointing out weird numeric improbabilities in birth dates is not damning in terms of strictly indicating pension fraud.
they are unreliable as recently as 60 years ago, and certainly were even more unreliable 100+ years ago.
But what's the scale of this problem? If only 1 in 100 have curiously round birthdates, that's not a problem. If 1 out of 2 have curiously round birthdates, it will still be suspicious if 100% of supercentenarians had it.
I don't quite understand why it would be a problem for birth certificates. Surely the date of birth noted on them doesn't have to be the date they're first printed?
The point of my story was that, yes, in this poor European country as recently as 1960.. people were regularly registering children weeks late, and the government would only issue birth cert where date=today. Which is why all of my aunts & uncles have a real & official birthdate which don't match.
This was happening in a place & time where there were telephones & buses.
It was simply inconvenient to get to the city immediately, so people went when they had the next opportunity, and presented opportunity to "choose a birthdate" by when they appeared.
This is only 1 particular example in 1 place of weirdness of official birth dates.
Imagine areas of the world a little further back when travel would have been by foot or horse. Given that this was happening even in a somewhat developed place & time, all sorts of stuff could be happening elsewhere for random, benign, non-pension-fraud related reasons.
But your example doesn’t fit the pattern of days divisible by 5 so it’s irrelevant.
The 5th of January is equally likely to be on any day of the week including weekends. Simply delaying + office days etc don’t get you that pattern it only shows up if people are filling in arbitrary dates.
Further if people are filling in arbitrarily dates +/- N years or even months that’s going to dramatically increase the number of officially extremely old deaths. Aka far more people die at 100 than 107. So randomly add or subtract a few years and on official paperwork you might lose one person who actually died at 107, but then add 2 people who actually died at 100 but officially died at 107.
> I don't quite understand why it would be a problem for birth certificates. Surely the date of birth noted on them doesn't have to be the date they're first printed?
I don't think people cared (or care even today) what is the date written on the birth certificate. And if the state really cares, they won't accept some date they're being told: using the current date is safer.
Why would the state trust their citizens so little? Where I come from births were registered by (Lutheran) priests for hundreds of years, and they had no problem accepting and noting the birth date the parents provided. Why would they not trust it, why would parents lie?
A friend named his daughter Andrea and registered her... before she was born. There was some benefits that expired at the end of the year.
At that time, there was no easy way to know the fetus' sex, so he chose female in a hunch and used a name that is female in Spanish, but male in other languages, so he could later allege an error.
She was born in January, a couple of weeks later than the certificate.
There are other traditions in some parts of Europe, such as assigning a newborns birthday as that of a child previously deceased. (Obviously possibly years away.) So, there may be additional explanations given we already have several here.
My in law was born on the 29th of February but registered on March 2 because parents thought it was bad luck to be born on Feb 29 and they were busy on March 1.
That was in Italy in 1968.
My polish father, born in 1954 was registered 13 months later, I don't remember the reason though.
Interesting, but this should be easy to control for in a statistical study. E.g. suppose 20% of people generally have strange looking official birth dates, but 50% of supercentenarians do.
This isn't a good control if the record accuracy depends on the age of person.
Imagine if you're trying to find medical fraud and you find out that a lot of supercentenarians have cancer. You try to control by comparing them to the average, and supercentenarians have higher rates of cancer than normal. Is that fraud, or does age lead to higher cancer rates?
The parent suggested controlling by the date of birth of all people born same year. I.e. if only 20% of all people born in 1900 have DOB registered on the first of month, but 50% of supercentenarians born in 1900 have DOB at the beginning of the month then something is fishy. The records accuracy should be same.
That is a decent control, though I think that finding "all people born in 1900" is probably more difficult than you'd imagine. I propose adding "who died 20-30 years ago" because that will make it easier to find comprehensive data. You would need to make sure your survey isn't biased towards people who were notable enough at age 90 to be included, because living past 100 makes people notable in a different way.
Yes, exactly. The question is if having a DOB on the first of the month grants mystical longevity. This can be answered regardless of the general accuracy of birth records.
Official and real birthdays is a thing in Asia too. Many boomers base their birthdays on Asian calendars instead of the Gregorian one. Another issue is related to buying immigration related identification.
I know some experts have poo-poo'ed the theory that Jeanne Calment's daughter impersonated her ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Scepticism_rega... ), but I don't find their arguments convincing. I'm not saying it's settled, but I think the evidence strongly points to her not being as old as she says, and I think the "experts" downplay the evidence for the switch theory too strongly, even if it is largely circumstantial:
1. The age gap between Calment and the next oldest person is the strongest evidence. It's very, very hard to ignore this.
2. As outlined in this article, there is a strong economic motive for the swap.
3. I think there is other evidence (e.g. some of the photos) that wouldn't be that strong on their own, but just add to the weight of the other, stronger pieces of evidences that there was a swap.
I was initially prone to believeing this, but the more I looked into it the more I realized how little sense it would make.
For your points:
1. This was the thing that initially made me skeptical, but it's just not enough to say. Sure living 3 years more then anyone else is pretty unlikely, but at the same time it's not proof.
2. The swap would have had to happen so early, when Yvonne was just 34 years old she would have had to impersonate her mother, pretend to be married to her father, and fool everyone in the small town she lived in. That is just not a credible thing. And the alleged payoff to avoid taxes doesn't seem big enough to be worth the immense effort that this swap would have had to go through.
3. Photos are fairly worthless for these sorts of things. Different angles, lighting, camera techniques all can make people look very different.
At the end of the day I find the alleged swap to be less believable then someone just living a long time
Also, even if you take the position that the age gap is so statistically unlikely as to be impossible[1], it tells you nothing about where the error is. It does not imply a swap. A swap is one possibility, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I don't see any credible evidence of a swap having occurred. Isn't it more likely that her age is simply wrong by a few years?
[1]Really, in statistics, extraordinarily unlikely is not the same thing as impossible.
> and fool everyone in the small town she lived in.
As others have pointed out, I think that is absolutely the wrong way to think about this. Yvonne Calment (or Jeanne) died in 1934. It's quite possible/likely that originally they were only trying to deceive the tax authorities. I also wouldn't discount how the chaos, upheaval and destruction of WWII (Arles was bombed heavily) would have made it easier for Yvonne to more "publicly" impersonate Jeanne in later years.
But Yvonne's funeral is recorded in contemporary newspapers, saying it was well attended and their was a viewing at the home. There is a death certificate signed by the parish priest and a notary. This swap wouldn't have been simple. And we have all the relevant records from Jeanne's life, none were destroyed in WW2 that I know of.
>"Curiously, her death certificate was issued on the basis of testimony of a sole witness, a 71-year-old unemployed woman (i.e. not a doctor or nurse) who “saw her dead”
So literally there is nothing that can be done to convince you then? Your prior is so strong that you are going to deny any evidence because you've decided something cannot happen.
When you impersonate someone, you don't have to fool everyone, you only have to fool your mark. No one else is likely to know or care what you're doing.
You think in a small town if someone's mom died and they started pretending to be her and pretending their dad is their husband people wouldn't think that was weird and talk about it?
It is worthy of note that until she was in a nursing home, at a claimed age of 110, "Jeanne Calment" avoided any publicity about her claimed age. For example she refused the local mayor's congratulations when she "turned 100" - instead newspapers wound up running a story about someone turning 95.
She literally waited nearly 50 years after the claimed switch, after she was in a new environment, with new people, without the people who would have most easily challenged it, to publicize her claim. This is exactly what we would expect from someone who was trying to hide a fraud.
> This is exactly what we would expect from someone who was trying to hide a fraud.
It's also perfectly reasonable to not want to be made a spectacle of. And to reconsider later. Maybe she didn't think 100 was worthy of spectacle, but 110 was; maybe 10 years or missing out on spectacle drove her to change her mind.
Yes, every piece of evidence can fit with switch or no switch. But the evidence is not equally likely under those theories. Therefore when I try to combine evidence I find that switch makes a lot more sense to me.
But many people who were younger then her remember her during that time period that you say she was only pretending for the taxman.
All of these claims are coming from people who live in another country and never did any investigatory field work in the area. Everyone who actually did the interviews and on the ground investigation came to the conclusion that there was no swap, and that the alleged swap wouldn't have made any sense.
Purely speculating for entertainment, but the switch could have started it for the reason of obtaining benefits, and not a thing shared with others, by the time she got to be old enough to be famous for it, had been going on for so long nobody cared or was alive at the time to remember maybe?
We have records of the daughters funeral in the towns newspapers. It was well attended and there was a viewing of the body afterward. Many people would have had to have been fooled/in on it from the very beginning.
The records dont confirm that there was a open casque viewing, but if there was, how recognisable is a mother vs her daughter if she just died of tuberculosis? In fact the funeral was very fast. She was buried the day after she died.
No, but they might think it was pension fraud and be unwilling to report their neighbors (even posthumously).
That seems unlikely, but we only have the one case of someone living that old vs many cases of unreported pension fraud so if we're assigning a prior to both I would say it's reasonable to assign a probability of pension fraud to be at least as high as the probability of her being truly that age.
First off the allegation isn't pension fraud, it's inheritance tax dodging. Or sometimes it's claims about tuberculosis that don't make sense. Secondly as I have said the whole swap thing has been investigated by multiple people, all who came to the conclusion that no swap took place. Furthermore since the people saying it was a swap are the ones making a claim and have literally 0 evidence, at a certain point you just have to accept that a woman lived slightly longer then anyone else.
I'm replying to myself to lay out the timeline of Yvonne's death, since that is when people claim this switch happened.
So first Yvonne's husband Joseph requested leave from the military and was granted it because his wife was sick, we have the record of that from the military.
There is a picture of Yvonne at a sanitarium for TB patients around this time period, further establishing she had TB and was ill.
Then the priest administered last rights and Yvonne died. There was a funeral mass that many people attended and a viewing of the body at the family home. This is in newspapers from the time.
There are no accounts of Jeanne being ill in this time period.
So for this switch to have happened we would have had to have the daughter sick, then the mother secretly gets sick just in time for the daughter to recover. The mother dies and they come up with this plan to dodge taxes, even though presumably it would be risky and Joseph could lose his position as an officer in the army if they are caught. They get the town's doctor, priest, and newspapers to go along with the fraud. All of this to avoid a tax of about 6% of Jeanne's wealth, a considerable sum but do you really think it would be worth all the risk?
At the end of the day, because of her status as the world's longest living person Jeeanne's life has been studied mroe then any other supercenturginarian, and no one has ever found proof that anything happened. We have census records from multiple decades, marriage and childbirth records with the government and church, and multiple mentions in newspapers.
> Sure living 3 years more then anyone else is pretty unlikely, but at the same time it's not proof.
The previous record at that point was 116 years, that's a 6 year gap. If you look at the distribution now it follows a fairly nice curve, except for that one far outlier.
> fool everyone in the small town she lived in
If I recall correctly they were living in a remote location and didn't meet with a lot of people.
It is an outlier, but as someone who works with data I can assure you that outliers happen all the time. That is just life.
They lived in an apartment above their business, a drapery store, so in the center of town pretty much. They also had servants who would have had to be in on the switch.
"but the more I looked into it the more I realized how little sense it would make."
True, but what is the probability for someone to become the world oldest person to ever have lived, and then to also outlive the second oldest by 3 years. It is 1 in 100 billions.
If you think the data for humans is marginal, just imagine what it is for dogs. I absolutely don't think some "list of oldest dogs" is in any way exhaustive given that the vast, vast majority of dogs worldwide don't have accurate records.
Maybe this works like a reversed Poisson distribution?
In running races, it's not uncommon for the winner to be minutes ahead of the runner-up, who is only seconds ahead of the 3rd. After they cross the finish line, several more cross soon thereafter, and then the bulk of the runners come streaming in steadily. Eventually, the bulk of the runners pass the line and we start to see stragglers who were far behind the group, trickling in one by one slowly.
The gaps in the ages of longest-living dogs are quite large, however: the second-oldest dog is in turn almost two years older than the third, there's four years between #4 and #7 (with the exact gaps between #4-#7 unclear, but there should be at least two gaps of >1 year). This strongly suggests the gap can be attributed to sparsity of data.
The gap between Calment and #2 is over 2.5x the next largest gap in the records (1 year 80 days between #4 and #5).
> This strongly suggests the gap can be attributed to sparsity of data.
Another hypothesis is that life, or genetic luck, tends to be harder on dogs than humans. Most dogs are dying as middle aged dogs, not as elderly dogs.
how do you know? I'm pretty sure that record keeping for dogs in Denmark is more accurate than record keeping for much of the world's human population, especially when you consider going back 100+ years for those humans.
The oldest dog is evidently Portuguese. Not sure what that country's record keeping for dogs is like.
And it's much easier to pass off one dog for another similar-looking one. There's substantial reason to suspect this may have happened with the current record holder for world's oldest dog ("Bobi"), for example -- IIRC, some of the photos show some sudden, inexplicable changes in coat patterning...
A human born 100 years ago would have been born in 1923, I'm pretty sure the records keeping of dogs in Denmark since 1993 (when the register was established) is better than a lot of humans 100 years ago.
But sure, many of the dogs we had in the U.S nobody knew what age they really were. I am however unconvinced that just because nobody knows what ages dogs are in one region that nobody anywhere knows what ages dogs are.
There is another factor about the age of dogs that pertains as well which is that basically the oldest dog anyone knows is definitely knowable all of someones life, of multiple people's lives in the same region actually.
Obviously nobody knows what age a dog is if adopted when grown but I wouldn't be saying the dog is 23 years old if I've only known it for 20 years, I would say it is at least 20 years old because that's how long I've known it. In this I can't help but feel I'm much like most people.
> thank you for answering my question of how you know a condition that you are familiar with from your country holds sway the world over.
Individual countries, even ones as populous with humans as China or India, or as populous with dogs as the US, don't matter for the total aggregate of record keeping. The record keeping status of an individual country is just an anecdote. It's the plural of a super-majority of the human or dog populations that become data.
> but I wouldn't be saying the dog is 23 years old if I've only known it for 20 years
People are arguing in this thread that this exact scenario happened as a conspiracy between multiple humans for Calment.
It's true that these conspiracies could exist, whether for humans, or for dogs. Bad record keeping could make it easier for dogs. Bad record keeping would also make it easier for a very long lived dog to not be recorded (though this is much less likely, as dogs over the age of 20 are something to remark on, and feral dogs generally don't live nearly that long).
>It's true that these conspiracies could exist, whether for humans, or for dogs. Bad record keeping could make it easier for dogs
the conspiracies would be more likely to have a payoff for humans though, and in the case of dogs as pointed out, all the humans that would be in charge of making a claim and that it lives among have probably lived as long as that dog or significantly longer.
As well as that there are probably lots of people who know the dog that have lived as long or longer, therefore, for any dog that it is likely somebody will make a claim about there are probably lots of people who would be able to contest the claim.
So in short, less profit, more people to dispute claims, either you have some records or you go through trouble of falsifying records for very little reason.
> or you go through trouble of falsifying records for very little reason.
As mentioned by duskwuff above this could be done with a simple dog substitution (easier to do if you're breeding your own dogs), not a record falsification.
And for some people a little local fame is enough. When the substituted dog starts to get closer to the world record then the little bit of worldwide fame is just a bonus. It could even start out innocently by naming a new dog after the deceased dog. If they look enough alike any other people might not notice the switch.
I'm not saying that it has happened, just that it's possible. And that bad record keeping for dogs would make it easier to either miss very old dogs due to not knowing their age, or to substitute younger dogs for older dogs.
> thank you for answering my question of how you know a condition that you are familiar with from your country holds sway the world over.
And for what it's worth, I live and was born in the US, but was thinking of a youtube channel that rescues animals (many of them dogs) in India, and another that rescues dogs in Ukraine.
> 1. The age gap between Calment and the next oldest person is the strongest evidence. It's very, very hard to ignore this.
This is in fact a very weak evidence, that only appears to be a strong one because of a common epistemological mistake, let me explain:
The odds of such an age difference are extremely small according to a certain model of how people age, such a model has proven to be pretty accurate for the majority of the population, but that says nothing about the outliers. For biological entities like humans, one only need a single exceptional mutation or pathology to be a super-human of some sort, not fitting into the model at all. In fact, the tallest man in history is also a statistically impossible outlier, yet there's no doubt about his existence and actual height, he just happened to have a rare condition that caused him to grow up to a disproportionate height. (And if you grabbed a Guinness book of records, you'll find these kinds of things in almost every category related to human anatomy or physiology).
Confusing the models with reality is a very common mistake in the history of science, often committed by people having a math background instead of a physics one, but not only. A very famous example is how French explorer Dumont d'Urville was ridiculed when he described the rogue waves he witnessed in the Indian Ocean, because such a wave would be statically impossible. It turned out that the physical model of waves at the time was just too simplistic, as rogue waves do in fact exist (and AFAIK we're still looking for a proper model explaining the phenomenon entirely).
Aging does not work like height. There are several biological processes that contribute to aging so one gene mutation would not make someone live longer. We can make people taller by giving them growth hormone. If aging was as simple we would have easy ways to slow aging by now.
Because the experts are in a joke, pseudo-scientific field in which the most prominent person is the man who verified her age with laughably poor methods and has a vested interest in not being proven wrong.
It's not an uncommon occurrence after a nasty divorce or a death. It smells less rotten when you learn that people generally regret doing it to some extent. Box full of memories into the fire in a fit of rage/grief.
I do genealogy. Of the family members that were born that long ago, we have pictures of maybe 1/4. It's not at all certain that "all family photos" amounted to much.
I'm just imagining having to turn over my google photos or emails to a government archivist, and I would for sure tell someone to sanitize it before giving it over.
If my records are over a hundred years old already, I hope I'll be far enough past embarrassment that I'm able to say "Take it, it belongs in a museum"
It doesn't damn her as a person, but if you're gonna claim to have won the lottery twice in a row, I think you had better have the receipts or people can safely assume you're either lying or confused.
For me one of the strongest bit against this is that her daughter would have had to pull the wool over everyone in their towns eyes, or they would have had to have been in on it too.
After the mother's death, she keeps going about her life as usual, goes by her original name, does all the normal things she did before. On official documents she lists her mother's name but around friends or neighbours goes by whatever they want to call her. Maybe a lot of the neighbours know what's going on, but hey, we all want to avoid taxes, right? So it goes.
And gradually she starts going by the other name instead. People nod and understand if she corrects them. And eventually everyone around her that might prove otherwise dies off, moves away, or loses contact. Decades go by. Soon everyone remembers that older spritely woman who's always been around here.
Any photos or evidence that might prove her story false, well they go missing. The ones that confirm it stick around.
you still have the problem to fool the official at death time. Making people believe that the mother's body was the body of the daughter. Death certificate were not signed out of nowhere even in 1934.
There is a picture of her on wikipedia when she was 70 in 1945, she doesn't look like a 47 years old person, by any metrics.
> Death certificate were not signed out of nowhere even in 1934.
Actually, the curious thing in this case is it kind of was:
"Curiously, her death certificate was issued on the basis of testimony of a sole witness, a 71-year-old unemployed woman (i.e. not a doctor or nurse) who “saw her dead”"
In France at the time (and maybe now?) there was no inheritance tax between spouses, but there is otherwise. The theory is that the father sees that his wife is dead and knows he only has so many years, but doesn't want to give the tax man any of his money. So they say "ah no, this is my daughter who has died- my wife is right here beside me". Then when he dies, well it's a spouse inheritance to his "wife".
The time between the first Calment death and Calment becoming notable is long enough - over 50 years - that it's plausible that people who were in on the scam/aware of the assumption of the mother's identity had already died. Especially since ww2 happened in the interim
Raffray is the biggest sticking point in this fwiw - he had time and incentive to debunk Calment's age, and had some preexisting relationship with her before they entered their contract.
There is little evidence that she ever spent much time at her official address. Living in remote villas, as she mostly did, and simply going by "Madame Calment", as she apparently also mostly did, few would have paid attention to her given name or any discrepancy between that and official records.
When her extraordinary claims of old age became famous many decades later, well, have you ever seen family members arguing what really happened many decades ago? Doubts would have been hard to sustain.
Well, either something like that happened... or she won a lottery with a 10 billion to 1 chance. My money is on the former. I've read enough stories about people assuming false identities to understand there's a number of ways to pull something like that off.
Whoa, watch out for a very common statistical error. For any particular property with a 10 billion to 1 chance, the probability that it applies to someone living is quite high. If you have a group of properties, each with an independent 10 billion to 1 chance, the probability that someone living has one of these properties is very high indeed.
The fallacy of thinking that winning a lottery is rare is common and has horrible effects like sending innocent people to jail on a regularly basis. For example, if you search Clearview AI for someone who is a 99.99% match for a surveillance picture of someone committing a crime, you should expect tens of thousands of matches. If the AI really did its job, it would return many hits along with a prominent warning that, with very high probability, any given one of these people did not commit a crime!
And, of course, someone always wins the lottery, since that’s the whole point.
>> Sir Roy Meadow, who testified that the chance of two children from an affluent family suffering SIDS was 1 in 73 million. He had arrived at this figure by squaring his estimate of a chance of 1 in 8500 of an individual SIDS death in similar circumstances. The Royal Statistical Society later issued a statement arguing that there was no statistical basis for Meadow's claim, and expressed concern at the "misuse of statistics in the courts".[3]
Why are you talking to me like I'm ignorant about statistics? I'm not the guy sending innocent people to jail on a 99.99% match.
Give me a plausible and ordinary way to cheat the lotto and I guarantee you there will be a lot of cheats. But I don't know of any plausible way to cheat the lotto.
Also, yes, the probability that at least one person on earth was the 10 billion to 1 chance is high, but that doesn't mean the chances of her being that person is high. There's simply too much "fog of war" in her past, such as the "daughter" dying of tuberculosis at a convenient time.
How easy is it to win a world particular world record by such a commanding margin past a cluster of runners-up? Easier than pulling the wool over a town's worth of people's eyes?
Usain Bolt and Magnus Carlsen have both better than #2 by more than the gap between #2 and #10. Of course, there are allegations that Bolt may not be competing fairly.
> 2. As outlined in this article, there is a strong economic motive for the swap.
Which one? We're not talking about Sogen Kato here, we're talking about Jeanne Calment.
Calment's daughter is supposed to have died in 1934, did the swap happen then? But there was no economic motive at all, the Calment family was part of the city's wealthy upper class and french social security was only introduced in 1945.
So what else, did the Calment's daughter fake her death somehow (despite her father, mother, husband, and son remaining public figures), then take over after the primary financial coup, the sale of the apartment to the notary in 1965, after what would have been the death of her husband and son both?
Not to mention the notary's strong incentive to uncover such a fraud: the flat was purchased in annuities, he ultimately paid twice the value of the flat (and waited 20 years before being able to use it, when Calment finally moved to a retirement home).
No, the economic incentive was not pensions, it was avoidance of death duties. It is precisely because Calment's family was wealthier that this motive is stronger:
All the discussion makes it seem like the difference would be of 20 years or something.
But she died at 122. There are 63 people who lived at least 115. I would say if it's reliable that humans can live up to 115, it's not a huge difference to my mental model on longevity if they CAN'T (yet) live to 120.
If you look at, say, the top twenty, the gap between each woman tends to be on the order of weeks to a few months. The gap between Calment and the runner up is over 3 years. Statistically, this is a giant chasm for continuous data like this.
Reminds me of Usain Bolt's 100m dash records, when he would shave a tenth of a second off a record crowded with incremental millisecond differences.[0]
The reality is even more amazing than the graph lets on, because Usain has never failed a drug test, whereas the 4 people directly to his left have, and the 5th person suspiciously missed enough drug tests to be temporarily banned. It's only when you get to Bromell and Kerley whose times are at the very top of the chart that you see times that come from clean runners.
Of the 10 who made it to 117, 4 made it to 118 and 3 of those made out to 119.
So the data are roughly consistent with a 40% chance of living another year at the age. That compounds to a 6% chance of living 3 more years. Two of the 119-year-olds dying within a year and one of them living 3 years is completely consistent with this model.
Many people here in the comments point out how unlikely it is that Jeanne Calment would have been able to pull off such an identity fraud. Let's say you believe there is a 0.00001% chance she could have done it.
Now compare that to, the probability of becoming the world oldest person to have ever lived, it is 1 in billions. Add to this that she outlive the second oldest person by 3 years. The probability is now somewhere in the 1 to 100 billions.
Then there is actually a 99.99999..% chance that Jeanne Calment was indeed a fraud.
The only way to prove her record beyond the reasonable doubt would be to do an extensive DNA testing with her deceased and living relatives as such tests have a one in billions accuracy as well, but this hasn't been done.
Here's maybe the key photos, showing the daughter, mum and the lady who lived on. Seems to me the daughter had a wider face and she's the one who lived on https://imgur.com/a/DsqLWdR
This summary misses a lot of recent developments in the case that were published recently in a book "Jeanne Calment, the Secret of Longevity Unravelled"
New evidence includes examples of signed documents showing that her signature changed suddenly in 1933, about a year before Yvonne is supposed to have died. There is also testimony from the family of a doctor in Switzerland that it was Jeanne who was ill with tuberculosis in 1931, not Yvonne who had recovered by then. There is also analysis of her recorded interviews showing that she often spoke more like Yvonne.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The extraordinary evidence simply isn't there, there's too much fog in which some thing could have happened where the daughter assumed the identity of her mother, for whatever reason. It could've been taxes, could've been something temporary that turned into something permanent. Hell, maybe she was a bored housewife and thought that cosplaying as a grandma would be fun. I'm sure she had a grand old time as a "90 year old" that was able to act like a spritely 60 year old.
I simply don't believe she was the oldest, although I do acknowledge there is a very slim possibility of it being true.
This is a scenario where science fails us, I think. Social scientists have "proved" she was the oldest with "99% accuracy". But Bayesian statistics would pose the question, "if the odds of being the world's oldest person are 1 in 5 billion, and you took a test that was 99% accurate that confirmed you were the oldest, what are the odds of you being the oldest if the test is positive?" It turns out the odds of you being the oldest person are still astronomically unlikely... you have better odds of winning the PowerBall than of being the world's oldest person.
The extraordinary claim here is that a 34 year old woman would impersonate her mother for decades, including living with her father, and no one would ever notice or say anything. Your perspective is like arresting anyone who wins the lotto for fraud, because it's more likely that they would cheat then just happen to guess the right numbers.
Mother and daughter lived side by side in the same building with their husbands. After the daughter passed and the grandson married he took that apartment, so Jeanne and her son-in-law cohabitated. Whichever explanation you choose you have to say that they were a close family who really liked their apartments.
There's no plausible way to cheat the lotto, every sold ticket is tracked.
There is a fairly plausible (and fairly ordinary) explanation for her extreme age (outstripping the next oldest by 3 years, and even with modern medicine and more people nobody is coming close to beating it).
Your Bayesian estimations make no sense. When the alternative is that it is the daughter who survived to 98 (which is already old) rather than the mother surviving to 122, the question should be phrased as "if you are older than 98 what is the probability that your age is 122".
"Number of Olympic medals" is a very poor analogous concept here, because it's not a directly measurable and variable trait, it's a complex tail-end derivative of several factors.
If you looked at "swimming speed", for example, which is the simple directly measurable thing, you would find that while Phelps is faster than other swimmers, , he is only a tiny bit faster than the next fastest swimmer, not 2.5 times faster than the next fastest swimmer.
Yeah, plus swimming is anomalous in and of itself due to the large number of very similar events.
I’m sure we’d see sprinters like Usain Bolt win a lot more medals if there were events like “100m in sandals, 100m on grass, 100m barefoot” to go along with the usual 100m race.
It depends on whether "living longer" is a continuous trait, I suppose.
I could imagine there being 20 or 30 genetic factors that affect your longevity, like whether you are susceptible to lung cancer from smoking.
Having a particular trait is a binary, which introduces the possibility for steps in the distribution; each slice of the population with a particular number of longevity factors has a certain distribution of actual lifespans that add together to form the observed life span, but the distribution of how many people have each distribution could decrease sharply; perhaps millions of people have 24 factors and produce centenarians, thousands have 25 factors and produce 110+, and dozens have 26 factors and produce 120+.
Such a model is entirely made up, pulled from my ass, but it is also quite compatible with our discrete genetics, and would be perfectly compatible with large gaps at the end of the distribution.
> "Number of Olympic medals" is a very poor analogous concept here, because it's not a directly measurable and variable trait, it's a complex tail-end derivative of several factors.
As if extreme longevity is not a complex tail-end derivative of several factors?
Well, so is swimming speed. I may not have the statistical terminology correct, but the difference is that "age" and "swimming speed" are directly measurable continuous aspects of reality, while "# of olympic medals is some kind of discretized derivative of others.
Imagine that instead of measuring "age" we measured "number of days person was the oldest person in the world". You'd get wildly divergent results for the latter that would be more like the olympic medal count.
Or if we determined how wet or dry a climate was not by measuring "annual rainfall" but, like "number of minutes per year in which more rain was falling here than other places".
I take your point that many measurements of age are faulty, but age is directly measurable the same way that "time to complete a swimming race" is directly measurable. It just takes a lot more patience to measure the former.
You can't test a swimmer after a race to see how fast they are either, but it's still a directly measurable quality.
One thing I would highlight, because this is what I've seen the French experts in this situation do, is look at each piece of evidence in isolation and say "Ha, this alone doesn't prove it."
And, to that point, I agree, it doesn't prove it (and, to clarify, I don't think the controversy is proven one way or the other). But I think it's wrong to look at each piece of evidence by itself - it's the totality of all the evidence that makes me extremely skeptical of the overall claim. E.g. if the age gap was the only piece of evidence, it wouldn't alone lead me to believe there was a swap, but all the evidence that Novoselov and Zak present together have convinced me of their theory.
The size of the data sample is massively different. Only a few thousand people have earned any Olympic medals, so variance is expected to be higher than in the "years lived" metric, where we have literally billions of data points.
I know that lots of people would discount this, but it's interesting to note that Jewish tradition holds that the maximum lifespan for a person is 120 years.
And Calment is the only person that might have exceeded this. To me that's another bit of evidence toward the impersonation theory.
This belief is commonly held by Christians as well. It comes from Genesis 6:3: “The LORD said, ‘My Spirit will not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; so his days will be one hundred twenty years.’”
At that point, Genesis had described several individuals as having lifespans in the hundreds of years, most famously Methuselah at 969 years. This is sometime before the Flood. Note that interpreting this verse as a lifespan limit is not universal—an alternative reading (possibly a more popular one) is that 120 years in this context refers to how many years were left until the Flood.
After the Flood, Genesis continues to describe individuals with long lifespans, but they decline rapidly. Abraham, for example, died at 175, ten generations after Noah. Later, in the post‐Exodus era, Deuteronomy says that Moses died at age 120.
My maternal grandparents are in their mid 90s, my paternal grandfather passed away a week before her 97th birthday.
A lot can happen within a century and there's usually hardly anyone alive to confirm some facts. My paternal grandmother's birth certificate was gone before the end of WW2 and when asked she would give an age six years younger - initially it was to prevent a scandal because not only was my grandfather of lower status (Pah! "Just" a doctor! Scandalous, I daresay!), he was younger.
As for my maternal grandparents their age is confirmed by their marriage certificate(would be harder to obtain one with this date as a younger person), children in their late 60s and living siblings of my grandpa, of whom there are seven.
Family history is funny like that. I have a few (usually female) ancestors who, according to censuses, just don’t age at quite the same rate as other people :)
I find it kinda charming. Gives some insight into who they are, and that fear of aging is a pretty universal feeling.
My grandmother was born in 1899 in Ireland, and moved to the USA in 1920. In the early 1980s, she came clean: "I don't want to spend eternity with a lie on my gravestone. I was born in 1894."
I only learned the truth right after she passed away and my father was free to discuss this - the year was 1911, not 1917 - clouded by two wars' worth of lost records.
In 1965, Raffray, a lawyer in the southern French city of Arles, thought he had hit on the real-estate version of a sure thing. The 47-year-old had signed a contract to buy an apartment from one of his clients “en viager”: a form of property sale by which the buyer makes a monthly payment until the seller’s death, when the property becomes theirs. His client, Jeanne Calment, was 90 and sprightly for her age; she liked to surprise people by leaping from her chair at the hairdresser. But still, it couldn’t be long: Raffray just had to shell out 2,500 francs a month and wait it out.
This article is amusing because some countries don't have a good way of notifying institutions about deaths (like the SS death master file)...and there are lots of issues associated with dying (taxes, inheritance, loss of benefits, etc).
In those countries they just don't report the death, sometimes for decades. I used to joke that the government should have a celebration of centenarians and see how many of them actually show up.
I used to joke that the government should have a celebration of centenarians and see how many of them actually show up.
IIRC a version of this happened a while back in Japan; the mayor of a town decided to visit some of the oldest residents, only to find that none of them were still alive.
Ah yes, anybody remember the lovely insurance companies who had PERFECT data for stopping annuity payments, but somehow couldn't find the records to pay life insurance claims?
The SS death master file has been broken for a decade now. Institutions that need death information have to work with private vendors that aggregate data from a variety of sources.
Yeah, once states were able to opt-out (due to medical/privacy issues) it basically stopped being a canonical reference. But it's still pretty good for the most part.
The part about birthdates being on first of the month or divisible by 5 seems pretty weak to me. Records weren't great back then and many very old people may not actually know their true birthdate.
Taking data for a whole country and drawing conclusions about a specific region may not be so good. For example, in the paper there is a lot of talk about bad data in the US but when they turn to the blue zone in the US there is no issue with the data. It's considered well kept.
For other places, like Sardinia, they don't explain whether the variations (1st of a month, etc) are happening at the local level. Can the data there be trusted? We are left to draw conclusions because many gaps aren't explicitly filled in.
The blue zones project limited the places they would label a blue zone to those that had good data. Many places were rejected because the data wasn't good. Looking at those places, like the UK or France, and stating they have untrustworthy data actually confirms the blue zones work of rejecting claims there due to untrustworthy data.
There is some statistical thing about fraud and the frequency of certain numbers being made up. I don't recall it specifically but made up amounts, dates, number have certain clusters of numbers vs what normally occurs.
edit; didn't get all that was in my head out :-)
So, it could be made up or support the fact that actual docs or good record keeping weren't a thing.
It's pretty strange, basically if you have a document with a bunch of numbers (say, some company's quarterly report), look at the leading digit of all the numbers. For some reason, numbers with a leading digit of 1 show up more often than those with a leading digit of 9 (i.e. 1,234,567 is more likely that 987,123).
You'd think there wouldn't be any particular pattern in the leading digit, I mean why should there be? But observational data seem to suggest a pattern.
So Benford's law can be used as a leading indicator of fraud. If you apply it to a quarterly report and there's an unusually high distribution of 8's, for example, then while you can't be certain that it's fraud, it might be flag to an inspector/regulator to take a closer look.
It's pretty obvious, really. A quick little sketchproof; say you have a metric, like headcount, revenue, expenses - whatever. These tend to grow exponentially-ish over time. When that's the regime, the number spends 1/3rd of it's time between 1 and 2 of its leading digit, and 2/3rds growing from 2 to the next power of 10. Similar logic applies if you're counting things that follow any power law - population of cities etc. Wherever you have a power law distribution, Benford's law applies.
But when humans enter data, they tend to fake numbers with a uniform distribution - to appear more random. That's how you catch it.
In Norway, the authorities had a problem with our SSN equivalent a few years ago - for decades, it had been SOP to assign any immigrant with unknown birth date the birth date January 1st.
Eventually, they ran out of valid SSNs for Jan 1st births in some years. (The number is on the form DDMMYY XXXYY, where XXX is assigned sequentially and YY are control digits.)
Hence, for any given date the system can accommodate 1000 people, plenty in a country with some 1000 births a week. Until you start assigning a certain date to people with unknown DOB, that is. They are now assigned a random date.
In the absence of that sort of SSN, it has a higher impact than you'd think. It comes up enough in the UK to be something we have to plan around.
It's a particular problem in refugee communities, especially where there may be common names. No certificate, often. What happens is that the first time they need to know their birthdate is when they have interaction with a healthcare system, and the doctor (or the admin staff), when told "Oh, some time in 1931, I think", puts "1/1/1931" into the records.
All it takes is two of "Samuel Goldstein, born 1/1/1931" in the same suburb and you've got a serious risk of misidentification when one of them has a heart attack and turns up in an ambulance. Misidentification of patients might be relatively uncommon, but the danger when it happens is severe.
You'd have to compare with a control group. If being 100+ was strongly correlated with having a birthdate on the first of the month or such then... maybe be suspicious.
That's exactly the point - it means that someone "guessed" the date. But if they guessed the day, the year isn't reliable, either, especially at these time scales.
Supercentenarians are people over 110 (centenarians are over 100). Only about 1 in 100,000 people live this long. Around 1 in 5 people live to 90. An order of magnitude more supercentenarians than average (through fraud or error) wouldn't make a noticeable difference in the number of people living 90-99, even assuming all supercentenarians were once counted as being 90-99.
Yes I understand that, but if you are saying some area is a "blue zone" where people tend to live longer, you'd expect an outsized number of 90-99 (and 100-109) for the same reasons that there are 110+, if those reasons are related to the geography (which is the claim with blue zones).
My understanding is the original authors of the blue zone study didn't actually check the number of people aged 90-99. They did look at life expectancy though, which was slightly higher for the blue zones. Not sure how to square that with the new finding of fewer people living 90-99 years.
Wouldn't even geographic blue zones be subjected to geopolitical and economic shocks? These events would disproportionately impact people by age cohort.
But, unfortunately, all the ones we know of can be skewed by environmental factors. And it is likely that the exact same environmental factors which make someone live longer will also make them appear younger than they are. Which makes them particularly unreliable exactly for the oldest people on record.
Even cells that don’t multiply still accept nutrients. Pretty much no atoms in our bodies stick around for too long. It’s why carbon dating largely measures the time an organism died.
Mineral deposits in our bodies (teeth and bones) are pretty good.
In non-replicating cells DNA would be pretty good too. Some of it gets replaced as repairs occur, but most of it would not. I'm not sure that carbon dating would be very accurate over the lifetime of a person (though specific events could cause specific sorts of deposits in bones during the occurrence of those events). And even if it was, radioactive carbon, either because of damage, or because of electrochemical effects, would probably be replaced in DNA more frequently than non-radioactive carbon, as long as the organism was alive, even in non-replicating cells.
This doesn't hold true for all cell types. There's a group in Sweden that has C14 dated the replication rate of some cell types. IIRC some cell types - some neurons and adipocytes - only replicate every 10 years or less. Their method has something to do with C14 from nuclear weapons: people who lived before they went off wouldn't have as much. And a lot of C14 would be from the uptake of nuke C14 since. IIRC pre-nuke people have adipocytes with C14 amounts compared to post-nuke people because those cells barely divide. That's what I picked up from a talk way back. I believe this is the same group.
https://news.ki.se/new-neurons-generated-in-the-hippocampus-...
I agree we could find markers of age, but I think they'd be nothing like tree rings, which are created by the freeze-thaw cycles and the fact that they are fixed in one place and exposed to the elements in ways humans are not.
Although, that begs the question, if a potted tree were to be placed on a cruise ship, which always sails to warm weather, would it fail to develop rings?
Trees in tropical climates don't have rings because they grow year round. If you took a tree that normally has rings to a climate where it would not be exposed to hot and cold, the tree would either die or not have rings:
apperantly Dodo birds has marking on the bones[0] which researchers interpert it as time they struggled to find resources (simillar to tree where you move between wet and dry season).
I guess one could cross reference times of femine to a skeleton with known lifetime to see if it shows up in humans as well.
There's probably nothing malicious about most cases of missing or strangely uniform birth dates. In many parts of the world over a century ago, people simply didn't bother with accurate records.
For example, both my grandpa and grandma had two birthdays each, in two different calendar systems, that pointed to wildly different points in time. Nobody remembered exactly when they were born. My other grandma was recorded as being four years older than she thought she actually was, and nobody knows the truth, either. My father's birth was filed with the authorities several years late, though the document itself pointed to the correct date. My family's not from some sort of jungle, either. All of this happened in a highly bureaucratized, highly literate society.
Go back a few more decades and one could easily imagine "She was born in the spring, in the year of the great flood" becoming "Let's just say she was born on April 1, and when was the flood? I mean the second one after Steve became king" when modern record-keepers demand a specific date. We're trying to see more precision in the data than anyone ever intended to record. No wonder we find artifacts.
Malicious no, suspicious yes. There likely were parts of the world a century ago without accurate records. It also appears that supercentenarians are concentrated in places that didn't keep accurate birth records around the time they were born.
There have been people who attempted to adopt the diets of the "blue zones" where many supercentenarians have lived, but maybe in our search for long life we should have been adopting regional poverty, low incomes, and dodgy record-keeping!
We need to look for patterns in the birth records of people born around the same time in the same area, but who died at a "normal" age. If the same patterns occur in both cases, it's just lossy record-keeping. If not, there might be something dodgy about the supercentenarians in particular. Without a proper control group, it's all speculation.
It is perfectly possible to be correlated. People almost universally eat more meat as they gain wealth. So if a diet of mostly plants really was the way to go, you aren’t going to find it in upper Manhattan.
A healthy diet not only makes you live longer. It also makes the experience less miserable when you reach an old age. That reason alone should be good enough.
As far as I know, there is only really significant evidence that people in the Mediterranean have a lower risk of heart disease. This could be the diet, but also the lifestyle in general or even environmental.
There is also the "hill argument". Mediterranean is hilly, promoting short periods of physically intense exercise which has been proven to be vital for health of cardiovascular system (huge UK wearables study)...aka often walking uphill carrying stuff is good for you
This was posted to bioRxiv originally in July 2019. You reasonably ask why the peer-reviewed version hasn’t been published yet and why 3.5 year work with 6 citations in a hot area of research is now distracting us from ChatGPT.
> Her original validators have demanded that their opponents provide proof of the switch [7]. However, it is a central tenet of longevity validation that the onus of proof is on the validators [2,3].
The validators have proved that Jeanne Calment was Jeanne Calment. They may be have made mistakes or even lied from the beginning but in any case it is not their role to prove that there was no switch but its the role of the accusers to prove that there was one.
Taken another way, imagine a future where dramatically longer human lifespans are possible. Assuming there was fraud here, normal-lifespan individuals could pretend to be a single individual for an even greater period of time.
Even with current technology, foundations can carry on a person’s wishes far into the future. Imagine if a personalized large language model were developed to reliably predict an individual’s future verbal utterances. Could a large language model trained on a large enough corpus of data predict the next thing a living person would do or say? If so, could there be an option to transfer personhood to the language model after that person’s death?
Before judging this as impossible, think of how well our voices can be replicated by AI. As Stephen Wolfram has pointed out, this process must necessarily entail modeling the part of the cerebral cortex that produces speech.
Best would be to see such an LLM being put in charge while the person is still alive, and then laugh every time the person is frustrated with a decision the LLM decided to take.
My great grandmother died a month shy of her 110th birthday. The main reason I don't doubt it was true is that my grandma (her daughter) is in fantastic health despite being the same age as my grandpa who is in fairly poor health, so there's definitely something in my great grandma's genes that seems to aid longevity. Unfortunately it's looking like my dad got a decent amount of my grandpa's genes instead of my grandma's in that regard, so I'm doubtful I'll be so lucky haha.
My dad was born on an Indian Reservation in South Dakota in the 1940s or maybe 30s. He has an age for the military, an age on his drivers license, and a bunch of ages he told people over the years. Mostly bankers. For probably 20 years whenever anyone asked him how old he was he would just say 39. He got a kick out of telling people the wrong age. He still does when he meets a new doctor.
Before his older sister died, I asked her how old Dad actually was, and she said he was “about” 5 years younger than her. And her birth certificate just said “September 1933” - it’s possible the date had rubbed off but it wasn’t there.
For anyone who has ever done any genealogy work, a lot of the official census dates were just guessed at. Spellings were made up. Birthdays were made up. Kids were made up… hired hand? Count him as a kid. Second wife? Count her as a kid. It’s just some guy going door-to-door asking you how many kids you have and when were they born and he’s getting paid by the number of houses he completes that day. Does that sound prone to accuracy?
I have some Mormon relatives and it’s always really interesting how hard it is to read that old scribble from the census and family trees, the official census takers handwriting was often sloppy cursive. And the 80 year-old genealogy worker in 1974 didn’t have much better handwriting. And especially in poor areas the government officials just didn’t care that much about getting correct numbers.
The pessimist in me thinks, the longer one lives (in their 90s and 100s), the more this database analysis could discriminate using this algorithm, and flag healthy, retired centenarians from getting benefits, hopefully not putting a freeze to their accounts or causing any stir to their peaceful retirement.
I myself have a difference of exactly one year from my real birthdate and official one.
Why? Because in 80s/90s India, it was common to have 'official' birthdate extended with expectation that this will result in one additional year of government benefits. That logic does not make sense to me but was prevalent at the time of my parents/grandparents etc.
It irks me a bit at times, however, there is nothing I can really do about it at this point - all my records, passport etc. are based on 'official' birthdate. To avoid any confusion or misunderstanding, I quote official birthdate to friends and other people. Realistically, only people who're aware of my actual birthdate are my family.
Interesting that the publication is from 2020 and doesn't appear to have ever been peer reviewed. Reading through it, the data doesn't support some of the conclusions. I would take this with a grain of salt.
I wonder if a lot of things in society are going to require some kind of physical in-person proof because of our inability to distinguish fake from real at some point soon.
The woman widely recognised as the longest-lived human in history may have stolen her identity as part of an elaborate tax evasion scheme, a group of researchers have claimed.
One of my parents comes from a poor rural area of Europe where well into the 60s, it was normal to have a "real" birthdate & an "official" birthdate. This was because the government only issued birth certificates in the nearby city, and being poor & rural, it took time to get there by bus, etc.
So I have aunts & uncles with real-official birthdate deltas of up to 2 weeks.
I'd imagine that going back to 1900s or 1880s, when travel was more difficult, who knows. Further, it is possible that the office in some of these areas for registering births was only open certain days of month/week, the further back you go, etc.
Maybe they only went into the city on market days when they had other business, on the first Monday of the following month.
Don't discount superstition and people registering births on nearest special days like saints days, etc.
Some of these abnormalities get lost to time. Many of my family didn't realize they had a real-official birthdate gap until 30+ years later when their mother told them.