See: "Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans"<p><i>In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. 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. 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.</i><p><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1" rel="nofollow">https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625547" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625547</a> (6 August 2019, 227 comments)
"Given that after age 100 the annual probability of dying is about 1/2, the chances of a centenarian living to 122 are incredibly small."<p>Small rant about this statement.<p>The annual probability of dying is not determined by a fair coin flip.
(at over 100 years)
It is determined by the physical world.<p>That number, .5 chance of dying is the result of a model to predict
the chance that someone over 100 will die.<p>So, to say that "the chances of a centenarian living to 122 are incredibly small.", is to say, the chances of living beyond one hundred are determined by a model's output, and not the physical world.<p>You certainly could say that based on empirical evidence, people hitting over 120 is very unlikely.
I feel like the pictures shown on the article demonstrate the opposite of the author theory.<p>When the author writes things like "undeniable", the resemblance is more questionable than undeniable when he tries to match the pictures of Yvonne with the ones of the 122 years old women.<p>I was not convinced at all by the article.<p>Moreover in such a rich family in France, changing identity like this would have been spotted really quickly.
Note that after this article was published, a few more scientific articles confirmed her longevity record, as mentionned in her wikipedia page:
<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment</a>
The excerpt from wikipedia with paragraphs refuting this thread's blog post's theory is interesting: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Skepticism_regarding_age" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Skepticism_rega...</a><p>>[...], the theory had attracted widespread media attention since 30 December 2018 after a series of postings on Medium titled "J'Accuse!" by gerontology blogger Yuri Deigin went viral.[27][28][29] This theory, however, is considered weak by mainstream longevity experts, such as French gerontologist Jean-Marie Robine.[30]<p>>Robine, a French gerontologist and one of two validators of Calment, dismissed the claims and pointed out that during his research Calment had correctly answered questions about things that her daughter could not have known first hand.[31][32] Robine also dismissed the idea that the residents of Arles could have been duped by the switch.[32][33] Michel Allard, the second doctor who helped verify Calment's records, said that the team had considered the identity switch theory while Jeanne was still alive because she looked younger than her daughter in photographs, but similar discrepancies in the rates of aging are commonly found in families with centenarian members.[8] Allard and Robine also pointed out the existence of numerous documents relating to Calment's activities throughout her life, and that the Russians brought no evidence forward to support their hypothesis.[8]<p>>After a meeting of the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris on 23 January 2019, French, Swiss, and Belgian longevity experts concluded that none of the Russian claimants provided any proof of an identity substitution, [...]
I remember seeing this article awhile back.<p>Really made me realize that sometimes simple, trivial things that everyone takes as fact really cannot be trusted.<p>The notion that Coco the gorilla could do sign language was another one that stuck with me.<p>Anyways, I think the best evidence 'against' Jeanne is that no other super-old person simply looked (both outwardly and physiologically) like someone 20 years thier junior. All the medical evidence points to her not actually being the age she claimed she was.<p>I'm of the opinion the 2nd place woman is also not legitimate. She probably just lied about her age so she could marry and then lived incredibly long.
<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Knauss" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Knauss</a>
From the article, albeit a bit... buried:
There is a petition to exhume the bodies and confirm the identity theft<p><a href="https://www.change.org/p/m-emmanuel-macron-p%C3%A9tition-en-faveur-de-l-exhumation-des-corps-de-jeanne-et-yvonne-calment-300e3b0c-4ab7-4bdf-b0bc-df40fc9c6487" rel="nofollow">https://www.change.org/p/m-emmanuel-macron-p%C3%A9tition-en-...</a>
A minor pet peeve of mine : I would like English-speaking writers to stop using the term « Victorian » for places that are not Britain or the British Empire. There was no Queen Victoria, no Victorian era, no Victorian spirit in France. Indeed it was a time of humiliation, political instability and rampant nationalism, albeit on a canvas of industry.
I am convinced that Jeanne Calment was actually two people. She is a fairly strange outlier in the record of the oldest people: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...</a><p>The oldest person on record is Jeanne at 122, then one 119, then one 118, then the next seven are at 117, then the next thirteen are at 116. She's just an extreme outlier from the rest of the distribution.<p>Also, in the 25 years since Calment, the distribution of subsequent extremely old people has seemed unchanged. Nobody has gotten any closer to Calment, although we've had far more people in the 114-117 range. It all points to a faked data point.
I read up on this when the article first came out, and what really stood out was the way the supports of Calment's claim / debunkers of the new theory would ignore how their supposed evidence did or did not fit in. IIRC, the Guinness authenticator talked a lot about how they authenticated the birth records and other types of records, which is irrelevant to this particular claim.
Evidence That Jeanne Calment Died in 1934—Not 1997
<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6424156/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6424156/</a>
I'd put my money on it being a fake. Maybe I'm cynical, but the refusal to provide DNA plus the deliberate destruction of photos seems fairly significant to me.<p>Years ago huge amounts were written about a woman who claimed to be Anastasia of the Romanovs. Lots of discussion, lots of detailed evidence, but when I read the bit about how she refused to ever speak Russian I knew which way I'd bet on that one.
I recently read the New Yorker article on this: <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-calment-the-oldest-person-who-ever-lived-or-a-fraud" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-cal...</a> which is very long and very worth reading and which I think gives both the "yes" and "no" sides a fair shake. Some key takeaways (my interpretation anyway):<p>-Yes, she looked startlingly young for someone her age in many pictures<p>-The extremity of how old she got is <i>really</i> surprising, considering that we can make distributional assumptions about age and that the existence of Jeanne Calment would imply that we should see quite a few other people at ages slightly less than hers and the next oldest is three years younger.<p>These are both surprising but not really independently so - it can hardly be surprising that someone who lives to an astounding age might look younger than they would be expected to.<p>Most of the other evidence, in particular her occasional slips mixing up father and husband have no real evidentiary value. Confusing relatives with each other is something that people with incipient memory failure do literally all the time.<p>However, I also think that the "two people" / "daughter swap" hypothesis, doesn't stand up to inspection very well. Specifically, the problem with it is that there is quite a lot of recorded testimony and recollections from people who absolutely would have known both of them, had no reason to lie, and were quite clear that they were different people.<p>Specifically in that article:-<p>Claudine Serena (or more particularly her mother and grandfather)<p>Freddy who was seven when his mother Yvonne died - can a seven year old keep up the pretence that his mother is his grandmother successfully?<p>Gilberte Mery who recalls the tradition of the promenades and the degree to which Arlesian bourgeois were constantly watching each other<p>The notary who administered Jeanne's and Yvonne's marriage contracts and then later carried out real estate transactions for Jeanne<p>Yvonne's husband requested leave from the army on the grounds of his wife's serious illness (and we have records of that)<p>Yvonne had a substantial public funeral, which would have involved viewing of the corpse by the very large number of prominent local people who knew her<p>I went into that article thinking that this would certainly be fake but came out thinking that faking this would have been completely impossible. There were just way too many people, many with no interest in perpetuating a lie, who would have had to go along with this - long before any possible motive about the world's oldest woman.<p>As to motive, apparently actual inheritance taxes would have been not the 34% in the OP but a mere 6% - an easy mistake to make if you don't have access to century old French inheritance tax law but a pretty important difference.<p>Incidentally, the role of Aubrey de Grey is very amusing in that article - it is pretty clear that he doesn't actually take the impostor theory too seriously but is using it as a tool in order to get his hands on the DNA sample which obviously makes sense given his interests.<p>To quote from the article: Either she had lived longer than any human being ever or she had executed an audacious fraud. As one observer wrote, “Both are highly unlikely life stories but one is true.”
I know its impossible but I still like to imagine that amongst the billions of people born over millennia, maybe one or two were age-mutants. They lived for hundreds of years. Did not see the point in convincing others of their age (may even thought it might be dangerous). Grew tired. Bored. And died eventually.
If this theory is true I guess it means she died at around 100, which is still honourable.<p>It would have been interesting if she had lived to 120 like a real supercentenarian, which means the fake age of 142. Then at least we would have been sure that something's off.
Fake supercentenarians have been used by multiple governments in the past to glorify their lifestyle. USSR did the same, claiming that Shirali Muslimov reached 168. China also has fake "longevity villages" that draw some tourism.
For a moment I thought the claim was Calment was a chimera as well as a long-lived person.<p><i>A chimera is essentially a single organism that's made up of cells from two or more "individuals"—that is, it contains two sets of DNA, with the code to make two separate organisms.</i><p><i>One way that chimeras can happen naturally in humans is that a fetus can absorb its twin. This can occur with fraternal twins, if one embryo dies very early in pregnancy, and some of its cells are "absorbed" by the other twin. The remaining fetus will have two sets of cells, its own original set, plus the one from its twin.</i><p><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/3-human-chimeras-that-already-exist/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/3-human-chimeras-...</a><p>Unfortunately the claim is more like identity theft. Much less interesting biologically.<p>This article outlines four types of known human chimeras:<p><a href="https://www.healthline.com/health/chimerism" rel="nofollow">https://www.healthline.com/health/chimerism</a>
Considering how difficult it is to verify information +200 years old and how likely it is that theories based on some information would fall apart if one piece turns out to be a fake or a lie, I wonder how much we actually know about history, or more like, what's the amount of lies we believe and live by everyday thinking it's undeniable truth because a group of "experts" thought it is.
Debunked, see study mentioned in <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49746060" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49746060</a>
That would be very cool.<p>There is this passage in Genesis [1]:<p>"And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years."<p>If you read the list of verified oldest people [2], the only person surpassing 120 is her.<p>I wonder if in ancient times they had some statistics and they found out there is some sort of hard limit to human lifespan.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%206%3A3&version=KJV" rel="nofollow">https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%206%3A3...</a><p>[2]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...</a>