Supercentenarian records show patterns indicative of errors and pension fraud (2020)
biorxiv.org
biorxiv.org
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.
In one case it kicked someones birthdate to a new calendar year and his pension kicks in a year later as a result.
They always joke the donkey was slow and cost him an extra year of work.
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 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.
EDIT: Almost forgot: I did skip a year during elementary, not sure about her case.
What a coincidence, me too!!
Going forward, this is now my official excuse...
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.
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.
And the grades mix/don't mix on their own volition at lunch and recess, anyways.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lots of bad data with lots of human bias.
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.
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?
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").
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.
This issue was even more pronounced in South America because of the distances.
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.
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.
but not serious enough to have staff distributed across the rural areas to actually be accessible to people outside the big cities..
It's easy to mandate things that are easily enforceable (date=today only legal birth cert). Doesn't mean its a useful mandate.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
That was in Italy in 1968.
My polish father, born in 1954 was registered 13 months later, I don't remember the reason though.
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?
My naive assumption is that they might be concentrated around Friday, or Saturday, or some other more "convenient" day.
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.
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
[1]Really, in statistics, extraordinarily unlikely is not the same thing as impossible.
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.
>"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”
a) Jeanne lived for 122 years.
b) Jeanne died and Yvonne's friends and neighbors allowed her to take her mother's identity.
I'm going with b).
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.
Search for "Publicity (lack of)" in https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/rej.2018.2167 for more details on that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can read this paper that did some math on this https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/rej.2019.2227
It concluded that the probability of an identity switch to be 99.99%
Proportionately this compares quite favorably to Calment, being about double her spread from the next oldest human.
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 gap between Calment and #2 is over 2.5x the next largest gap in the records (1 year 80 days between #4 and #5).
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.
The oldest dog is evidently Portuguese. Not sure what that country's record keeping for dogs is like.
So anyway, in Denmark this is the standard https://www.hunderegister.dk/home dogs are tracked pretty well here.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
This is how all legends start, really.
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”"
https://yurideigin.medium.com/jaccuse-why-122-year-longevity...
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".
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.
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.
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/rej.2018.2167 digs into this a bit.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark
>> 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]
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.
Furthermore, the population of cricketers is not sampled randomly, but by selectors
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).
https://yurideigin.medium.com/jaccuse-why-122-year-longevity...
I also like part 3 where he talks about the strange fact that the husband and son died of non-natural causes.
I have a feeling that Yvonne might have been quite the psychopath.
Great subject for a documentary.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...
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.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_metres#All-time_top_25_men
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_long_jump_world_reco...
There's only one in-competition jump better than Bob Beamon's in the last 55 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_pole_vault_world_recor...
Started in 1984 at 5.85, ended in 1994 at 6.14, after breaking the world record 30 times, I think, took 20 more years for someone to beat his record.
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 is an interesting paper on the subject: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/rej.2019.2227
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
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.
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.
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 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).
That doesn't mean her record isn't legit. Michael Phelps won 23 Olympic gold medals. The most decorated Olympian after him won 9.
There can be a big gap between the top performer and the second best performer. I'm sure a professional statistician would like to chime in.
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.
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.
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.
As if extreme longevity is not a complex tail-end derivative of several factors?
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".
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_metres#All-time_top_25_men
Measuring age depends on records and tying records to people. Both of which are easily failable proceses.
You can't test a swimmer after a race to see how fast they are either, but it's still a directly measurable quality.
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 age gap is is just a few years. not inconceivable at all.
And Calment is the only person that might have exceeded this. To me that's another bit of evidence toward the impersonation theory.
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.
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.
I find it kinda charming. Gives some insight into who they are, and that fear of aging is a pretty universal feeling.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/nov/30/oldest-woman...
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.
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.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/world/asia/15japan.html
[2] https://www.economist.com/banyan/2010/08/06/the-case-of-the-...
Exactly why they can't be trusted!
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.
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.
But when humans enter data, they tend to fake numbers with a uniform distribution - to appear more random. That's how you catch it.
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.
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.
Here's an example of how a similar principle can be used to observe electoral fraud: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Russian_legislative_elect...
To me the biggest finding is the lack of people 90-99 in the same areas. Where are the supercentarians coming from with a lack of 90+ pipeline?
For example, there are certain cells that don't multiply after birth (eg. some nerve cells). One could presumably date carbon atoms in their DNA...
Or parts of the body that don't regenerate - like tooth enamel.
I suspect with the right type of imaging, you'd probably find 'tree rings' in things like fatty deposits in arteries too.
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.
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.
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?
https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/how-climate-works/tree-...
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.
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!
A colleague of mine points out that for most subjects over 110 the gero-forensics seems to be well done (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nikolay-Zak-2/publicati... ).
Interesting summary on page 31, table 2, and the inevitable shoutout or shout-down of the venerable Jeanne Calment.
> 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.
It's the basis of science
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.
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.
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.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/world-oldest...
It’s like with Usain Bolt, he was miles ahead of the other sprinters. And they had all been confirmed to have been cheating.
Tl;dr: while fraud or bad record keeping might indeed be involved, I think the article is flawed.