Jeanne Calment’s 122-year old longevity record may be fake (2018)
yurideigin.medium.com
yurideigin.medium.com
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.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625547 (6 August 2019, 227 comments)
70 years ago, Sardinia had a reputation for banditry, sheep rustling (which turned to kidnapping), vendettas, and resistance to the State. The island does fit the pattern, despite having mellowed out to an extremely low crime rate today.
But France as one of the global powers has a very low crime rate in the 30s and the Calments are notable from their region not random unknown. If you think about it, the whole thing doesn't make much sense. Yvonne Calment should somehow have decided to replace her mother for sixty years including twenty while her husband was still alive for unclear reasons (a far fetched motive involving taxes was only found after Zay started pushing his theory) successfuly fooling the French state.
The whole thing doesn't make any sense. I don't understand how Zay was published (I mean, I do, it took him a decade to find a bad enough journal but it's sad) and I don't know why serious people are wasting their time arguing with him.
At this point, I just wish the genetic analysis were done to close the whole thing.
If the variance of a disruptive event is higher than the variance of a process, we expect the extremes to be disruptive events. The things people are willing to say (by accident or as a lie) are much more radical than the results most processes work to. So it is not that strange if an extreme event turns out to be effectively a bad evidence keeping.
Small rant about this statement.
The annual probability of dying is not determined by a fair coin flip. (at over 100 years) It is determined by the physical world.
That number, .5 chance of dying is the result of a model to predict the chance that someone over 100 will die.
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.
You certainly could say that based on empirical evidence, people hitting over 120 is very unlikely.
* Chances of any given 100 year-old dying before age 122 (according to this model): 1 - 1/(2 ^ 22) = 1 - 1/4,194,304 = 99.999976%.
* Number of centenarians currently alive: ~573,000
* Chances that all living centenarians will die before age 122: (1 - 1/4,194,304) ^ ~573,000 = ~87%. (I've hand-waved a bit here, but it's close enough.)
So, according to this model, there's roughly a 13% chance that at least one current centenarian will live to 122. I would actually say this model is too optimistic.
“The Gompertz–Makeham law states that the human death rate is the sum of an age-dependent component (the Gompertz function, named after Benjamin Gompertz), which increases exponentially with age[2] and an age-independent component (the Makeham term, named after William Makeham)”
I think it’s possible they badly described this model.
Now, that’s an empirical law. There’s evidence that it overestimates probability of dying for centenarians. A recent article (https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol44/52/defaul...) uses a different model, compares it with actuarial data, and concludes:
“Based on the Bayesian analysis, there is a greater than 99% probability that the current MRAD of 122 will be broken by 2100. We estimate the probabilities that a person lives to at least age 126, 128, or 130 this century, as 89%, 44%, and 13%, respectively.”
In [1]: print('\n'.join([f'(age={100+i}, number={573000/2**(i+1):.3g})' for i in range(23)]))
(age=100, number=2.86e+05) (age=108, number=1.12e+03) (age=116, number=4.37)
(age=101, number=1.43e+05) (age=109, number=560) (age=117, number=2.19)
(age=102, number=7.16e+04) (age=110, number=280) (age=118, number=1.09)
(age=103, number=3.58e+04) (age=111, number=140) (age=119, number=0.546)
(age=104, number=1.79e+04) (age=112, number=69.9) (age=120, number=0.273)
(age=105, number=8.95e+03) (age=113, number=35) (age=121, number=0.137)
(age=106, number=4.48e+03) (age=114, number=17.5) (age=122, number=0.0683)
(age=107, number=2.24e+03) (age=115, number=8.74)
Surprisingly different from munchler's numbers though, so I may have something wrong.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_living_peop...
If a million people become centenarians each year and the yearly probability of death for one was 1/2, we would expect a to see a 122 year old every 4 years.
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.
I was not convinced at all by the article.
Moreover in such a rich family in France, changing identity like this would have been spotted really quickly.
The rest however was indeed very convincing to me. Mismatched eye color, height and appearance untypical of that age, and cognitive tests that estimated a much younger age? That's not something you can just discard imho, and those are the metrics you can hardly fake.
> changing identity like this would have been spotted really quickly.
Unless the people close to her didn't have an interest in spilling the beans.
She sold her apartment for a fixed per month amount. Sure, you need to have the apartment in the first place but that doesn't sound rich to me.
Further, if my neighbor dies, I do not have any insights in the paperwork. So at that point, I only know that that nice older lady from upstairs died. If you then ask me 60 years later if that older lady was the mother or the daughter, I am not sure I would know. Besides, I would probably be proud of someone like her in my neighborhood, so I might be careful to refute her. Afterall, you get a lot of prestige from having the longest lived person in your country, city or neighborhood.
>[...], 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]
>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]
>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, [...]
Does anybody know the primary source for this? What did she know?
Of course, one was very hard to find until I eventually figured out the entire area had been re-developed.
Street view is also fun to see how places I've lived have changed.
That doesn't sound too convincing - what if those similar discrepancies are also caused by fraud? It's one of the rare cases where Occam's razor would support foul play over the "simpler" claim.
I suppose for that argument to be simpler you would need to have an overview of how many centenarians have these similar discrepancies, and then compare to how often fraud is generally found with younger groups. If you have fraud in younger groups were children have assumed the identities of their parents at a rate that would match the same thing happening in older groups if we assumed that the older groups were in fact fraudulent in this way then I suppose it would be simpler to assume that those centenarians were frauds rather than assume an unknown property of centenarians that allowed them to be easily confused with their children while in middle age.
however if centenarians are not frauds it seems likely they would age slower than others or be in some way more robust, and if so it seems reasonable they might closely resemble their adult children if they had those children at a fairly young age.
Really made me realize that sometimes simple, trivial things that everyone takes as fact really cannot be trusted.
The notion that Coco the gorilla could do sign language was another one that stuck with me.
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.
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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Knauss
See, e.g., https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/06/are-superc...
Source paper: "Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1
Empiricism rests on the assumption that the Universe and phenomena in it are fundamentally observable. Which means that phenomena generate some kind of interaction with their surroundings.
Observability is depenent on the frequency, strength, certainty (as opposed to ambiguity), of those interactions. There's a strong association between the sensibility of phenomenon (our ability to see, hear, smell, feel, or taste it directly) and its believability, though also with recordability. "Capturing something", on film, tape, audio, or other sensing devices, is key to demonstrable proof. (In its absence we're mostly limited to testimony or second-hand accounts. Durer's Rhinocerous is a wonderful example of a second-hand account, visualised in detail. It's almost dreamlike, startlingly accurate in some particulars, oddly off in others.)
Empiricism does most poorly with rare or hard-to-sense phenomena. Literal black swans, neutrinos, the interior of the Earth, subatomic particles, the boundaries of the Universe, interiors of stars, black holes and neutron stars (massive, but not very emissive). Or the very long ago (think evolution and geology). Epidemiology and statistical methods for rare and distributed events. Various sensing, visualisation, microscopy, telescopy, tomographic, and other methods.
Even in cases of very difficult-to-sense phenomena, though empiricism tends to improve in its resolving capability with time and improvement of methods. And where those capabilities improve, rare-but-real phenomena are more revealed over time. The distant (or small, or remote in time, or hard to percieve) becomes clearer. Presumed-extinct species are found. Hidden structures within the Earth are visualised, and correlated with other events (see the evolution of the concept of plate tectonics, one of my favourite instances).
Where the phenomenon is not real, though ... it either decreases in prevalence (mostly in the case of frauds), or in the case of "edge-of-perception" sensing, in which random noise is mistaken (or hallucinated) as actual, remains roughly constant over time.
Spellling all this out, I'm all but certain there's an established concept built around this (or several). Though it seems a useful heuristic in determinng likely validity or falsity of phenomena given enhanced sensing or recording capabilities.
UFOs have remained frustratingly ellusive. Meteorites have become stunningly compelling. Footage of accidents, abuses of power, or casual racism are now starkly evident (if often undeterred by the fact of video). And so on.
Though I've been trying to come up with counterexamples --- thins previuosly thought fantastical or unlikely now known to be real.
I'd illustrated a bloggish version of my comment above with Albrecht Durer's Rinocerous --- he'd drawn that from second-hand reports (and a poor-quality sketch). It's clearly not right, but it's also not entirely wrong, and the mix of "details captured well" with "where did that come from" is fascinating.
Lightning sprites are another that comes to mind, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning)
https://deepdreamgenerator.com/
A good story about the duck-billed platypus, which was believed apocrophal for a long time.
https://gizmodo.com/legendary-cryptids-that-turned-out-to-be...
Thanks.
And yes, Durer's image is one that just grows on you. I've known of it since I was a child. It just keeps getting better. There is some Deep Dream feeling about it --- being told that there's something there, so you find it regardless of whether or not it actually is.
Try staring at a field of raw static for a while. (This used to be easier when television was an analogue broadcast, I'm not sure what the easiest source is now. Inkblots are another possible option.)
From that link:
> The 1891 directory records that the 1890 US census listed Sarah D. Clark as age 10, which is roughly consistent with a September 1880 birth date.
Very interesting & well written write up! Even though Wikipedia says "Better source needed" for whatever reason.
The author still casts a good amount of doubt on her claim though, and even assuming the existing evidence is correct she still couldve been 116 it says.
But yea as long as you don't have birth certificates or baptism records I guess that would always be true.
One I've noticed is "Einstein was super smart" when a simpler theory is "Einstein didn't cite prior work so everyone thought he did it."
What prior work? Most of the discussion about Einstein's theories not being original and not being credited seem to relate to his first wife, I thought.
https://www.change.org/p/m-emmanuel-macron-p%C3%A9tition-en-...
BTW. 'stavros, when did you migrate the username? I have your old handle burned in my brain, now I have to rewire some neural pathways...
--
[0] - I.e. disable uBlock Origin. I don't think the phrase "disable adblocker" correctly describes the critical role of uBlock Origin as a basic means of personal hygiene on the Internet.
We have to adapt our language to the person we are communicating with, and if they are familiar with the time frame associated with Queen Victoria, I can see how it makes sense to use it. We could refer to the period of Isabella II of Spain, but they wouldn't understand us, so it would be rather pointless.
I think it is different in that numbering years is useful, and we need to have an agreed starting point, and by historical accident we've all adopted an estimated (likely slightly incorrect) birth year for the founder of one of the world's major religions. It is hard to pick a culturally-neutral starting point – astronomers sometimes use the Julian period starting at 4713 BCE, but while that is more religiously neutral it still isn't culturally neutral. (It is based partially on astronomy, but also partly on the taxation cycle of the ancient Roman Empire, and that's still Western-centric.)
By contrast, applying names to periods of time is far less useful and far less portable across cultures. The 1800s looked very different in different parts of the world, but it was the same 100 year span everywhere. And we only do this for a handful of historical periods anyway (most seem to be named after British monarchs – Victorian, Georgian, Edwardian, etc). Applying those period names to places outside the British Empire is a bit like applying Japanese era names to European history. The whole thing of historical era names seems to be somewhat dying anyway – references to decades (the 1990s, the 1920s, etc) seems more popular in discussing more recent history – the Elizabethan era was in the 16th and very early 17th century, not in the 20th and early 21st.
> We have to adapt our language to the person we are communicating with, and if they are familiar with the time frame associated with Queen Victoria, I can see how it makes sense to use it. We could refer to the period of Isabella II of Spain, but they wouldn't understand us, so it would be rather pointless.
"mid-to-late 19th century" covers roughly the same timeframe, and everyone knows what that is.
Sure, but a lot more of the world was part of the British Empire during those periods than has ever been part of the Japanese (and there's a lot of second-order uses for cultural/artistic trends that originated in the British world of those times but are found elsewhere, e.g., “Victorian architecture”.)
I don't think there is an issue with speaking of "Victorian X" where X culturally originated in the British Empire. People talk about "Second Empire style" in the history of US and Canadian architecture, but neither was ever part of the Second French Empire. The problem is when people start talking about "Victorian X" when they aren't talking about the British Empire or its cultural exports, they are talking about things that happened outside it and not under its particular influence or involvement, but merely at the same time.
Use of AUC was actually far more popular in the West in the Renaissance than it ever was in antiquity. It helped produce a false impression that it was more significant in Roman history than it ever was.
"The 80s" (1 decade) is considered in more detail than "the interwar period" (20ish years), which is considered in more detail than "The victorian era" (70 years) which is considered in more detail than the Renaissance (200 years) which is considered in more detail than "Late antiquity" (500 years).
I suspect in 2100, not very many people will be talking about the 1980s in great detail, and if the term 20s is used will refer to the current decade
There are some astronomical cycles that could be used as a neutral reference.
For example, due to the precession of the Earth's axis, the star which is the North Star changes over a 41000 year period. So we could pick the time when the axis was pointing most closely at the star Vega, 11000 years ago, as the epoch.
That's a great idea you have there. I like it. I am going to quibble with some of the finer details though:
41,000? I thought the best estimate for the Platonic year, the time for the precession of the equinoxes to complete one revoution, was 25,772 years?
The Gregorian calendar has a 400 cycle. If we are sticking with the Gregorian calendar, any new epoch needs to be aligned with the 400 year Gregorian cycle, or else leap year calculations will suddenly get more complicated. So that suggests using something like -23600 CE (23601 BCE) as the starting point. That's 64 Gregorian cycles before 2000 CE, which is the closest possible whole number of Gregorian cycles to 1 Platonic year prior to 2000 CE (a Platonic year is 64.43 Gregorian cycles).
The Gregorian cycle is of course based on the AD/CE chronology, modulo 400, so it is still an indirect link to Christianity. But I think it is as practically close to culturally neutral as we could get, without also changing the calendar. (Which isn't really Christian in origin anyway – it was developed in pagan ancient Rome, and the 7 day week is pre-Christian in origin as well, through Judaism, and possibly some ancient Babylonian influence as well – the only Christian to touch it was Pope Gregory XIII, and his aim was only to make its leap year rule more astronomically accurate, albeit he ended up linking it more tightly to the AD/CE year numbering in the process.)
Yes, I mixed up the precession cycle with the obliquity cycle.
"Although the Hindu–Arabic numeral system[1][2] (i.e. decimal) was developed by Indian mathematicians around AD 500,[3] quite different forms for the digits were used initially. They were modified into Arabic numerals later in North Africa. "
Arabic numerals does not only describe the concept of decimal system, but also the shape of digits. Hence "arabic numerals" is the correct description, and "Hindu-Arabic numerals" describes different numerals -- shapes for digits.
To be honest, from the second picture you've linked, it would seem that North Africans didn't do almost anything with at least 0, 1, 2, 3, 7, 9 either. So what Dürer printed in the 1500s has 0, 1, 2, 3, 7, 9 from the Indians, 6, 8 from the West Africans, and 4 and 5 seem to be European developments. I have no idea how you get European "4" from the Ghobar numerals by rotating the respective Ghobar numeral. In fact topologically European "4" is more similar to the earlier Gwalior numeral, and the early European "4" in your picture is the Gwalior "4" upside down.
> he would have had to coincidentally adapt them back to more nearly resemble the forms in the inscription in Chaturbhuj Temple at Gwalior from three centuries earlier
...but why are you contradicting yourself now? First you say that numeral shapes used in Europe were developed by North Africans and then you say that the forms come actually from India. Which one is it, then?
I agree that "transferred through North Africa from India in a recognizable shape" is pretty much the case—but not without change. As you point out, by looking at the 6 and 8, you can see that that's how the transmission happened. Even the 5, 7, and 9 seem recognizably intermediate to me.
Reminds me of the story of the British headline "Fog in channel -- continent cut off".
And in that sense it's wildly misleading to apply it outside of the UK.
You don’t have to look too long before the Victorian era to find an era where France is the undisputed center of attention in Western history.
I'm not sure a lot of people on the internet would be able to place the third Republic on a timeline. And then we'd be talking a 70-years period, close to the length of the Vvictorian era, but shifted 30 years forward ;-)
It is not an issue with the language. It is an issue of propaganda. Hence used in relation to France.
An English speaker might say "In Japan during the later Meiji era..." and a slightly more awkward one might say "In Japan during the later Victorian era". Which mean the same thing except for ~10 year ambiguity since the Empress of India and Emperor of Japan in question largely overlapped.
I don't know enough Japanese to say for sure, but in Japanese we might have the exact thing except reversed with (literally) "In Victoria's ruling era Britain" and "in Meiji's ruling era Britain". (Anyone know if someone might actually say that?)
Sounds just the same.
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.
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.
FWIW I think the jury is definitely still out, but I would take the "Jeanne was 2 people" bet 9 ways to Sunday if it could be proven with DNA evidence.
You don't have a conclusive proof either way, but on one side you have an extreme outlier event that puzzles the medical science, and on the other you have a garden variety white-collar crime with obvious motive. I know what I'd bet on.
It's an outlier sure, but how extreme is unclear. France being a developed nation (say 5 - 10% of global population at the time). Jeanne being upper middle-class (again say 5% of France).
How many with the potential to live a much longer life did not do so because they lacked Jeanne's social advantages? Or did actually live long, but were not documented.
If we could model these premature deaths and fit them into the curve, how much less extreme would Jeanne appear to be?
>> I never found any convincing rebuttals of (a) the sheer outlier-ness of Jeanne's age
If Jeanne was truly genuine, how could anyone realistically explain such a statistical anomaly, other than by pointing out the documentary evidence?
I'm not saying the new theory is right, I'm saying that, as an uninterested party, my initial reaction was "wow, this is definitely plausible, and certainly could explain some of the more unlikely parts of Calment's case." What struck me was how the Western European researchers immediately went into defensive mode, casting aspersions on the motivations of the Russians, etc., instead of just examining the theory dispassionately.
Does it in all cases?
I don't have the source, but I know I've read the claim that some of the people who live exceptionally long seem to have "stopped aging" in the sense that their risk of death, while high, leveled out to a constant.
Isn't it like a radioactive element with a half-life?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-life_mortality_decelerati...
We would need more and more reliable data in order to give a definite answer.
There are tens of millions of people dying each year, but there single digit numbers of 110+ year olds dying each year. You would expect discontinuities and variations from small random events. A single person slipping in a shower would be enough to mess up that curve.
Many, many of those billions don't have their ages tracked correctly.
x=rnorm(1e8,mean=70,sd=8);
x=sort(x);
print(tail(x))
[1] 112.9213 112.9481 113.3819 113.7021 113.9032 116.7363Now that people over 110 were all born in the 20th century more and more actually can be verified, so the gap is beginning to close. A lot more people seem to be living into their 110s, but it's really hard to say how much of that is due to people's better health and better health care for the very aged, and how much is simply due to the increased verifiability.
I'm not convinced by the evidence in the link because it's hard to make judgements about so long in the past. But that's exactly why suspicion should be the default stance, with such financial incentives to inflate one's age. For me, claiming that people would have spotted the switch or attacking the qualifications of the authors isn't enough.
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.
-Yes, she looked startlingly young for someone her age in many pictures
-The extremity of how old she got is really 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.
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.
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.
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.
Specifically in that article:-
Claudine Serena (or more particularly her mother and grandfather)
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?
Gilberte Mery who recalls the tradition of the promenades and the degree to which Arlesian bourgeois were constantly watching each other
The notary who administered Jeanne's and Yvonne's marriage contracts and then later carried out real estate transactions for Jeanne
Yvonne's husband requested leave from the army on the grounds of his wife's serious illness (and we have records of that)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Would settle most of the questions.
My nephew's name starts with the same letter as my own name, and consequently, only he and I can consistently get the two names straight. It's a bit of an extreme case, but anyone with a decent-sized family can probably attest to the inability to get even their immediate relatives correctly identified 100% of the time correctly, and this is far before anyone starts getting senile.
An aunt of mine who had dementia near the end of her life was quite lucid in the sense that she could talk about family memories coherently, but she would substitute different people, sometimes of different generations and relationships, for the ones she was talking about.
This Jeanne Calment thing reminds me a lot of the theories about why Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare, and Mark Twain's contribution to the field.
https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/is-shakespeare-dead/
He was joking though, satirizing the conspiracy theorist's tone, I'm pretty sure.
If your risk of death flattens out, but is not zero, then your expected lifespan is very finite. I think some people have claimed that exceptionally long lived people do end up with a constant (albeit high) risk of death per year rather than an increasing one.
It's a little bit sad to think that nothing remotely human could possibly see what the world will be like in a million years, let alone a billion. We could all be 20 years old permanently, and we'd still only live a few thousand years.
https://pelicanstateofmind.com/louisiana-love/jacques-st-ger...
This story fascinates me. I recently went to New Orleans and happened to walk by Jacques’ house; I saw the current owner snoozing in an armchair with a book. Later I went down the rabbit hole of the Count’s life and how he seems to be the progenitor of so many things and legends in modern society.
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.
The point is that no one ever lived to 120 in a provable way, so it's not something that could have happened to the daughter. Also in the swap hypothesis Yvonne made it to 99, not 100.
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.
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.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/3-human-chimeras-...
Unfortunately the claim is more like identity theft. Much less interesting biologically.
This article outlines four types of known human chimeras:
The underlying argument in that article is that the people around Calment would have known that Yvonne is not Jeanne, and therefore they would have been caught.
An alternative explanation is that the people around Calment knew nothing of her claiming to be Jeanne at all until much later on in her life. By which time the only people who knew about the fraudulent claim would be either very old themselves, or sympathetic to the situation an old and dear friend or family member has found themselves in.
The only way to know for sure would be DNA testing.
This doesn't make sense - there is witness testimony and other records attesting that Yvonne, the daughter, died. Her husband sought leave from the military to be by her side.
>It is not reasonable to claim that she could provide, for example, the names of JC’s godparents based upon her recollection of what she might have read many years previously in an attempt to maintain a fraud.
Yes, it is. That's the best example?
> On a eu accès à des informations qu'elle seule pouvait connaître, comme le nom de ses professeurs de mathématiques ou de bonnes passées par l'immeuble. On lui a posé des questions sur ces sujets. Soit elle ne se souvenait plus, soit elle a répondu juste. Sa fille n'aurait pas pu savoir ça.
"We have had access to information that only she [Jeanne] could have known, such as the name of her math teachers or of nannys who passed through the building. We have asked her questions on such subjects. She either didn't remember them, or she answered correctly. Her daughter [Yvonne] wouldn't have had how to know these things."
Things like math teachers' names and nannys seem much more convincing to me. It's not impossible to know them, but I can tell you for sure I don't know such things about my mother, and I am about the age Yvonne was when she died (or when her mother would have died if we believe this theory).
[0] https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/jeanne-calment-une-impostu...
(Alas no mention of nonbynari-man)
Wait, what? Cherry poisoning??
Still, chronic cyanide exposure isn’t good for you.
> Cherries have a small, hardened pit that surrounds their seed, also called a kernel. The kernels of cherry pits and other stone fruits contain the chemical amygdalin. Amygdalin is a cyanogenic glycoside — a chemical that your body converts into the toxic compound hydrogen cyanide.
In Ozark episode S2E19, Darlene poisons her husband Jacob's coffee with ground cherry pits, for a current cultural reference.
I've cracked and eaten a cherry pit. It was strangely tasty.
There is this passage in Genesis [1]:
"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."
If you read the list of verified oldest people [2], the only person surpassing 120 is her.
I wonder if in ancient times they had some statistics and they found out there is some sort of hard limit to human lifespan.
[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%206%3A3...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...