119 Years Old and Winning Marathons–Or Not?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
The oldest man to ever live, Jiroemon Kimura, only lived to 116. Only 7 men have ever lived (confirmed) to 114 or older.
Now here is someone who has the health and wellness of a much younger man, claiming to be the oldest man who's ever lived by 3 years (a huge outlier!). We should have a healthy dose of skepticism of such claims.
Even Jeanne Calment is being re-examined based primarily on how much of an outlier she was at 122 years old, 3.5 years older than the next oldest person ever[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Scepticism_rega...
He's a 119 year old man, men typically live shorter lives. He can still run. He looks nowhere near 119. And this is all based on a year that he verbally declared off of the top of his head years ago since he was never given a birth certificate. The four pieces of paperwork "proof" he's providing don't really mean anything, it would just mean that he knowingly or unknowingly lied to an official.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Ching-Yuen
7ft tall old guy who is incredibly fit and agile with many witnesses claiming their grandparents knew him as an old man when they were children.
"He died from natural causes on 6 May 1933 in Kai Xian, Sichuan, Republic of China and was survived by his 24th wife, a woman of 60 years.[8][7] Li supposedly produced over 200 descendants during his life span, surviving 23 wives.[9][8] Other sources credit him with 180 descendants, over 11 generations, living at the time of his death and 14 marriages"
Exactly; death and aging are programmed. We know of hereditary conditions that cause premature aging and death; why can't the opposite exist, causing a human to age more like a tortoise.
It seems that birth records and appearance are all we got to go on?
I think the biological aspect that is the proxy for age should not affect the well-being of the person.
[1] https://medium.com/@yurideigin/jaccuse-why-122-year-longevit...
[2] https://medium.com/@yurideigin/more-evidence-for-jeanne-calm...
[3] https://medium.com/@yurideigin/oh-jeanne-why-so-young-8e8019...
He hasn’t won any marathons, he would however be the world age group record holder because nobody of that age has ever completed one.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/sports/119-year-old-runne...
> Singh carried two more documents. One listed him as the first-place finisher at 200 meters (50.26 seconds) for sprinters 100 and over at the 2014 Malaysian Masters Athletics Championships.
> A school transfer certificate had been found. Based on the certificate, he said, Dharam Pal Singh was “78 or so.” And he was not illiterate. The age was corrected on Singh’s election card, but he continued to use an old card “to hide his age,” the civil servant said.
Edit: Oh man, this is a fascinating Wikipedia edit history: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=785789045&oldid=78...
The information above was originally included in the "Controversy section", sourced from the NYT. On June 15 2017, an editor rephrased the Wikipedia section containing the above information, and reversed the order of the two sentences. However, when they did so, they moved the citation from the _end_ of the two sentences to the _middle_ of the two sentences. Later, on August 9 2017, a different editor removed the second sentence as unsupported (because it was no longer followed by a blue [number]). Thus was the information that some documentation supported an age of "78 or so" lost from Wikipedia.