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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I know some experts have poo-poo'ed the theory that Jeanne Calment's daughter impersonated her ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Scepticism_rega... ), but I don't find their arguments convincing. I'm not saying it's settled, but I think the evidence strongly points to her not being as old as she says, and I think the "experts" downplay the evidence for the switch theory too strongly, even if it is largely circumstantial:

1. The age gap between Calment and the next oldest person is the strongest evidence. It's very, very hard to ignore this.

2. As outlined in this article, there is a strong economic motive for the swap.

3. I think there is other evidence (e.g. some of the photos) that wouldn't be that strong on their own, but just add to the weight of the other, stronger pieces of evidences that there was a swap.

View on HN

I was initially prone to believeing this, but the more I looked into it the more I realized how little sense it would make.

For your points: 1. This was the thing that initially made me skeptical, but it's just not enough to say. Sure living 3 years more then anyone else is pretty unlikely, but at the same time it's not proof. 2. The swap would have had to happen so early, when Yvonne was just 34 years old she would have had to impersonate her mother, pretend to be married to her father, and fool everyone in the small town she lived in. That is just not a credible thing. And the alleged payoff to avoid taxes doesn't seem big enough to be worth the immense effort that this swap would have had to go through. 3. Photos are fairly worthless for these sorts of things. Different angles, lighting, camera techniques all can make people look very different.

At the end of the day I find the alleged swap to be less believable then someone just living a long time

When you impersonate someone, you don't have to fool everyone, you only have to fool your mark. No one else is likely to know or care what you're doing.

You think in a small town if someone's mom died and they started pretending to be her and pretending their dad is their husband people wouldn't think that was weird and talk about it?

At first you just "pretend" to the taxman. You only start pretending publicly when all the people who could confound you are dead.

It is worthy of note that until she was in a nursing home, at a claimed age of 110, "Jeanne Calment" avoided any publicity about her claimed age. For example she refused the local mayor's congratulations when she "turned 100" - instead newspapers wound up running a story about someone turning 95.

She literally waited nearly 50 years after the claimed switch, after she was in a new environment, with new people, without the people who would have most easily challenged it, to publicize her claim. This is exactly what we would expect from someone who was trying to hide a fraud.

Search for "Publicity (lack of)" in https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/rej.2018.2167 for more details on that.

> This is exactly what we would expect from someone who was trying to hide a fraud.

It's also perfectly reasonable to not want to be made a spectacle of. And to reconsider later. Maybe she didn't think 100 was worthy of spectacle, but 110 was; maybe 10 years or missing out on spectacle drove her to change her mind.

Yes, every piece of evidence can fit with switch or no switch. But the evidence is not equally likely under those theories. Therefore when I try to combine evidence I find that switch makes a lot more sense to me.

But many people who were younger then her remember her during that time period that you say she was only pretending for the taxman. All of these claims are coming from people who live in another country and never did any investigatory field work in the area. Everyone who actually did the interviews and on the ground investigation came to the conclusion that there was no swap, and that the alleged swap wouldn't have made any sense.

Purely speculating for entertainment, but the switch could have started it for the reason of obtaining benefits, and not a thing shared with others, by the time she got to be old enough to be famous for it, had been going on for so long nobody cared or was alive at the time to remember maybe?

We have records of the daughters funeral in the towns newspapers. It was well attended and there was a viewing of the body afterward. Many people would have had to have been fooled/in on it from the very beginning.

The records dont confirm that there was a open casque viewing, but if there was, how recognisable is a mother vs her daughter if she just died of tuberculosis? In fact the funeral was very fast. She was buried the day after she died.

No, but they might think it was pension fraud and be unwilling to report their neighbors (even posthumously).

That seems unlikely, but we only have the one case of someone living that old vs many cases of unreported pension fraud so if we're assigning a prior to both I would say it's reasonable to assign a probability of pension fraud to be at least as high as the probability of her being truly that age.

First off the allegation isn't pension fraud, it's inheritance tax dodging. Or sometimes it's claims about tuberculosis that don't make sense. Secondly as I have said the whole swap thing has been investigated by multiple people, all who came to the conclusion that no swap took place. Furthermore since the people saying it was a swap are the ones making a claim and have literally 0 evidence, at a certain point you just have to accept that a woman lived slightly longer then anyone else.

Small towns have a more closed circle form of gossip

Also, even if you take the position that the age gap is so statistically unlikely as to be impossible[1], it tells you nothing about where the error is. It does not imply a swap. A swap is one possibility, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I don't see any credible evidence of a swap having occurred. Isn't it more likely that her age is simply wrong by a few years?

[1]Really, in statistics, extraordinarily unlikely is not the same thing as impossible.

> Sure living 3 years more then anyone else is pretty unlikely, but at the same time it's not proof.

The previous record at that point was 116 years, that's a 6 year gap. If you look at the distribution now it follows a fairly nice curve, except for that one far outlier.

> fool everyone in the small town she lived in

If I recall correctly they were living in a remote location and didn't meet with a lot of people.

It is an outlier, but as someone who works with data I can assure you that outliers happen all the time. That is just life.

They lived in an apartment above their business, a drapery store, so in the center of town pretty much. They also had servants who would have had to be in on the switch.

> outliers happen all the time

I'm replying to myself to lay out the timeline of Yvonne's death, since that is when people claim this switch happened. So first Yvonne's husband Joseph requested leave from the military and was granted it because his wife was sick, we have the record of that from the military. There is a picture of Yvonne at a sanitarium for TB patients around this time period, further establishing she had TB and was ill. Then the priest administered last rights and Yvonne died. There was a funeral mass that many people attended and a viewing of the body at the family home. This is in newspapers from the time. There are no accounts of Jeanne being ill in this time period.

So for this switch to have happened we would have had to have the daughter sick, then the mother secretly gets sick just in time for the daughter to recover. The mother dies and they come up with this plan to dodge taxes, even though presumably it would be risky and Joseph could lose his position as an officer in the army if they are caught. They get the town's doctor, priest, and newspapers to go along with the fraud. All of this to avoid a tax of about 6% of Jeanne's wealth, a considerable sum but do you really think it would be worth all the risk? At the end of the day, because of her status as the world's longest living person Jeeanne's life has been studied mroe then any other supercenturginarian, and no one has ever found proof that anything happened. We have census records from multiple decades, marriage and childbirth records with the government and church, and multiple mentions in newspapers.

> and fool everyone in the small town she lived in.

As others have pointed out, I think that is absolutely the wrong way to think about this. Yvonne Calment (or Jeanne) died in 1934. It's quite possible/likely that originally they were only trying to deceive the tax authorities. I also wouldn't discount how the chaos, upheaval and destruction of WWII (Arles was bombed heavily) would have made it easier for Yvonne to more "publicly" impersonate Jeanne in later years.

But Yvonne's funeral is recorded in contemporary newspapers, saying it was well attended and their was a viewing at the home. There is a death certificate signed by the parish priest and a notary. This swap wouldn't have been simple. And we have all the relevant records from Jeanne's life, none were destroyed in WW2 that I know of.

From the Deigin article:

>"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”

It doesn't have to be simple. It just has to be more plausible than the alternative. So, which of the following is more likely?

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).

So literally there is nothing that can be done to convince you then? Your prior is so strong that you are going to deny any evidence because you've decided something cannot happen.

I never said or implied that. A photo of Jeanne shortly after her daughter's death would be very compelling, for example.

"but the more I looked into it the more I realized how little sense it would make."

True, but what is the probability for someone to become the world oldest person to ever have lived, and then to also outlive the second oldest by 3 years. It is 1 in 100 billions.

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%

The current, known, oldest living dog is almost 1.5 years older than the second oldest. The current one is also still living, so could exceed this number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_living_dogs

Proportionately this compares quite favorably to Calment, being about double her spread from the next oldest human.

Conspiracy-theorist goggles on... this is also fraud?! (I have no evidence, just pointing out the possibility)

Yeah, I think we've all considered that. Accurate record keeping for pets is worse than for humans.

how do you know? I'm pretty sure that record keeping for dogs in Denmark is more accurate than record keeping for much of the world's human population, especially when you consider going back 100+ years for those humans.

The oldest dog is evidently Portuguese. Not sure what that country's record keeping for dogs is like.

Significant numbers of dogs are feral, or of uncertain age and origin when adopted.

And it's much easier to pass off one dog for another similar-looking one. There's substantial reason to suspect this may have happened with the current record holder for world's oldest dog ("Bobi"), for example -- IIRC, some of the photos show some sudden, inexplicable changes in coat patterning...

thank you for answering my question of how you know a condition that you are familiar with from your country holds sway the world over.

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.

> thank you for answering my question of how you know a condition that you are familiar with from your country holds sway the world over.

Individual countries, even ones as populous with humans as China or India, or as populous with dogs as the US, don't matter for the total aggregate of record keeping. The record keeping status of an individual country is just an anecdote. It's the plural of a super-majority of the human or dog populations that become data.

> but I wouldn't be saying the dog is 23 years old if I've only known it for 20 years

People are arguing in this thread that this exact scenario happened as a conspiracy between multiple humans for Calment.

It's true that these conspiracies could exist, whether for humans, or for dogs. Bad record keeping could make it easier for dogs. Bad record keeping would also make it easier for a very long lived dog to not be recorded (though this is much less likely, as dogs over the age of 20 are something to remark on, and feral dogs generally don't live nearly that long).

>It's true that these conspiracies could exist, whether for humans, or for dogs. Bad record keeping could make it easier for dogs

the conspiracies would be more likely to have a payoff for humans though, and in the case of dogs as pointed out, all the humans that would be in charge of making a claim and that it lives among have probably lived as long as that dog or significantly longer.

As well as that there are probably lots of people who know the dog that have lived as long or longer, therefore, for any dog that it is likely somebody will make a claim about there are probably lots of people who would be able to contest the claim.

So in short, less profit, more people to dispute claims, either you have some records or you go through trouble of falsifying records for very little reason.

> or you go through trouble of falsifying records for very little reason.

As mentioned by duskwuff above this could be done with a simple dog substitution (easier to do if you're breeding your own dogs), not a record falsification.

And for some people a little local fame is enough. When the substituted dog starts to get closer to the world record then the little bit of worldwide fame is just a bonus. It could even start out innocently by naming a new dog after the deceased dog. If they look enough alike any other people might not notice the switch.

I'm not saying that it has happened, just that it's possible. And that bad record keeping for dogs would make it easier to either miss very old dogs due to not knowing their age, or to substitute younger dogs for older dogs.

> thank you for answering my question of how you know a condition that you are familiar with from your country holds sway the world over.

And for what it's worth, I live and was born in the US, but was thinking of a youtube channel that rescues animals (many of them dogs) in India, and another that rescues dogs in Ukraine.

If you think the data for humans is marginal, just imagine what it is for dogs. I absolutely don't think some "list of oldest dogs" is in any way exhaustive given that the vast, vast majority of dogs worldwide don't have accurate records.

The gaps in the ages of longest-living dogs are quite large, however: the second-oldest dog is in turn almost two years older than the third, there's four years between #4 and #7 (with the exact gaps between #4-#7 unclear, but there should be at least two gaps of >1 year). This strongly suggests the gap can be attributed to sparsity of data.

The gap between Calment and #2 is over 2.5x the next largest gap in the records (1 year 80 days between #4 and #5).

> This strongly suggests the gap can be attributed to sparsity of data.

Another hypothesis is that life, or genetic luck, tends to be harder on dogs than humans. Most dogs are dying as middle aged dogs, not as elderly dogs.

Maybe this works like a reversed Poisson distribution?

In running races, it's not uncommon for the winner to be minutes ahead of the runner-up, who is only seconds ahead of the 3rd. After they cross the finish line, several more cross soon thereafter, and then the bulk of the runners come streaming in steadily. Eventually, the bulk of the runners pass the line and we start to see stragglers who were far behind the group, trickling in one by one slowly.

> 1. The age gap between Calment and the next oldest person is the strongest evidence. It's very, very hard to ignore this.

This is in fact a very weak evidence, that only appears to be a strong one because of a common epistemological mistake, let me explain:

The odds of such an age difference are extremely small according to a certain model of how people age, such a model has proven to be pretty accurate for the majority of the population, but that says nothing about the outliers. For biological entities like humans, one only need a single exceptional mutation or pathology to be a super-human of some sort, not fitting into the model at all. In fact, the tallest man in history is also a statistically impossible outlier, yet there's no doubt about his existence and actual height, he just happened to have a rare condition that caused him to grow up to a disproportionate height. (And if you grabbed a Guinness book of records, you'll find these kinds of things in almost every category related to human anatomy or physiology).

Confusing the models with reality is a very common mistake in the history of science, often committed by people having a math background instead of a physics one, but not only. A very famous example is how French explorer Dumont d'Urville was ridiculed when he described the rogue waves he witnessed in the Indian Ocean, because such a wave would be statically impossible. It turned out that the physical model of waves at the time was just too simplistic, as rogue waves do in fact exist (and AFAIK we're still looking for a proper model explaining the phenomenon entirely).

Aging does not work like height. There are several biological processes that contribute to aging so one gene mutation would not make someone live longer. We can make people taller by giving them growth hormone. If aging was as simple we would have easy ways to slow aging by now.

>experts have poo-poo'ed the theory

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.

Also she had her personal documents and photos burned, a damning piece of evidence which is mentioned without comment here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Age_verificatio...

There is nothing damning about it? Half of HN would immediately start throwing paper into the BBQ if the city requested access to personal documents.

It doesn't damn her as a person, but if you're gonna claim to have won the lottery twice in a row, I think you had better have the receipts or people can safely assume you're either lying or confused.

But ALL family photos too? That smells rotten.

I do genealogy. Of the family members that were born that long ago, we have pictures of maybe 1/4. It's not at all certain that "all family photos" amounted to much.

It's not an uncommon occurrence after a nasty divorce or a death. It smells less rotten when you learn that people generally regret doing it to some extent. Box full of memories into the fire in a fit of rage/grief.

Why burn photos of yourself, though, at an advanced age?

I'm just imagining having to turn over my google photos or emails to a government archivist, and I would for sure tell someone to sanitize it before giving it over.

If my records are over a hundred years old already, I hope I'll be far enough past embarrassment that I'm able to say "Take it, it belongs in a museum"

For me one of the strongest bit against this is that her daughter would have had to pull the wool over everyone in their towns eyes, or they would have had to have been in on it too.

Well, either something like that happened... or she won a lottery with a 10 billion to 1 chance. My money is on the former. I've read enough stories about people assuming false identities to understand there's a number of ways to pull something like that off.

Whoa, watch out for a very common statistical error. For any particular property with a 10 billion to 1 chance, the probability that it applies to someone living is quite high. If you have a group of properties, each with an independent 10 billion to 1 chance, the probability that someone living has one of these properties is very high indeed.

The fallacy of thinking that winning a lottery is rare is common and has horrible effects like sending innocent people to jail on a regularly basis. For example, if you search Clearview AI for someone who is a 99.99% match for a surveillance picture of someone committing a crime, you should expect tens of thousands of matches. If the AI really did its job, it would return many hits along with a prominent warning that, with very high probability, any given one of these people did not commit a crime!

And, of course, someone always wins the lottery, since that’s the whole point.

Similar example leading to false imprisonment:

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]

Why are you talking to me like I'm ignorant about statistics? I'm not the guy sending innocent people to jail on a 99.99% match.

Give me a plausible and ordinary way to cheat the lotto and I guarantee you there will be a lot of cheats. But I don't know of any plausible way to cheat the lotto.

Also, yes, the probability that at least one person on earth was the 10 billion to 1 chance is high, but that doesn't mean the chances of her being that person is high. There's simply too much "fog of war" in her past, such as the "daughter" dying of tuberculosis at a convenient time.

The time between the first Calment death and Calment becoming notable is long enough - over 50 years - that it's plausible that people who were in on the scam/aware of the assumption of the mother's identity had already died. Especially since ww2 happened in the interim

Raffray is the biggest sticking point in this fwiw - he had time and incentive to debunk Calment's age, and had some preexisting relationship with her before they entered their contract.

Would she?

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.

you still have the problem to fool the official at death time. Making people believe that the mother's body was the body of the daughter. Death certificate were not signed out of nowhere even in 1934. There is a picture of her on wikipedia when she was 70 in 1945, she doesn't look like a 47 years old person, by any metrics.

> Death certificate were not signed out of nowhere even in 1934.

Actually, the curious thing in this case is it kind of was:

"Curiously, her death certificate was issued on the basis of testimony of a sole witness, a 71-year-old unemployed woman (i.e. not a doctor or nurse) who “saw her dead”"

https://yurideigin.medium.com/jaccuse-why-122-year-longevity...

retire and collect a pension quite early, and go about your life.

The bigger deal is avoiding inheritance taxes.

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".

How easy is it to win a world particular world record by such a commanding margin past a cluster of runners-up? Easier than pulling the wool over a town's worth of people's eyes?

Usain Bolt and Magnus Carlsen have both better than #2 by more than the gap between #2 and #10. Of course, there are allegations that Bolt may not be competing fairly.

Don Bradman in Test cricket. His career average was 99.94. Next best is 61.87, and there are over 17 other guys over 55.00.

There are I guess fewer than 10,000 Test cricketers. It's a low n compared to the entire human population.

Furthermore, the population of cricketers is not sampled randomly, but by selectors

There is little evidence that she ever spent much time at her official address. Living in remote villas, as she mostly did, and simply going by "Madame Calment", as she apparently also mostly did, few would have paid attention to her given name or any discrepancy between that and official records.

When her extraordinary claims of old age became famous many decades later, well, have you ever seen family members arguing what really happened many decades ago? Doubts would have been hard to sustain.

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/rej.2018.2167 digs into this a bit.

I think you all are underestimating how much of a smoking-gun the magnitude of the gap is.

> 2. As outlined in this article, there is a strong economic motive for the swap.

Which one? We're not talking about Sogen Kato here, we're talking about Jeanne Calment.

Calment's daughter is supposed to have died in 1934, did the swap happen then? But there was no economic motive at all, the Calment family was part of the city's wealthy upper class and french social security was only introduced in 1945.

So what else, did the Calment's daughter fake her death somehow (despite her father, mother, husband, and son remaining public figures), then take over after the primary financial coup, the sale of the apartment to the notary in 1965, after what would have been the death of her husband and son both?

Not to mention the notary's strong incentive to uncover such a fraud: the flat was purchased in annuities, he ultimately paid twice the value of the flat (and waited 20 years before being able to use it, when Calment finally moved to a retirement home).

No, the economic incentive was not pensions, it was avoidance of death duties. It is precisely because Calment's family was wealthier that this motive is stronger:

https://yurideigin.medium.com/jaccuse-why-122-year-longevity...

Could a 59 year old's body be substituted for a 36 year old's body? If not, what did they do with the supposed daughter's body?

Sure, why not. It's not like you are trying to swap a 70-year-old with a teenager. If the family ages gracefully, it is definitely possible.

Yes. A bit of make up here or there. You should dive a little bit deeper into the j'accuse. Its quite a brilliant piece.

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.

Avoiding inheritance taxes, or distribution of a will that might not have favored the daughter?

There was only a daughter.

You can will things to anyone, any entity.

I don't believe that is true in France, or at least not back then there were laws about minimum inheritances.

Not in France. French civil law on inheritance is much more strict than common law. For example, you cannot disinherit your children.

Interesting. Can you partially disinherit them, but donating some large sum to a charity in the will, for example?

Depending on the number of children, at least half the estate will go to them, rising to up to 3/4 for more children.

All the discussion makes it seem like the difference would be of 20 years or something.

But she died at 122. There are 63 people who lived at least 115. I would say if it's reliable that humans can live up to 115, it's not a huge difference to my mental model on longevity if they CAN'T (yet) live to 120.

Look at the list of longest living women:

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.

Reminds me of Usain Bolt's 100m dash records, when he would shave a tenth of a second off a record crowded with incremental millisecond differences.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_metres#All-time_top_25_men

I'm reminded of the long jump record:

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

Also Bubka:

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.

See also Just Fontaine's record in number of goals in a single world cup.

The reality is even more amazing than the graph lets on, because Usain has never failed a drug test, whereas the 4 people directly to his left have, and the 5th person suspiciously missed enough drug tests to be temporarily banned. It's only when you get to Bromell and Kerley whose times are at the very top of the chart that you see times that come from clean runners.

Sure, I understand, I'm just saying the story of "Calment is a fraud" and "All Supercentenarians are frauds" is just a very different story.

Of the 25 who made it to 116, 10 made it to 117.

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.

Probabilities can be tricky.

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

I had a read of Yuri Deigin's blog post on it, "J’Accuse…!", and found it fairly convincing. It has lots of photos of mum and daughter and you can amuse yourself figuring which is which https://yurideigin.medium.com/jaccuse-why-122-year-longevity...

Here's maybe the key photos, showing the daughter, mum and the lady who lived on. Seems to me the daughter had a wider face and she's the one who lived on https://imgur.com/a/DsqLWdR

This summary misses a lot of recent developments in the case that were published recently in a book "Jeanne Calment, the Secret of Longevity Unravelled"

New evidence includes examples of signed documents showing that her signature changed suddenly in 1933, about a year before Yvonne is supposed to have died. There is also testimony from the family of a doctor in Switzerland that it was Jeanne who was ill with tuberculosis in 1931, not Yvonne who had recovered by then. There is also analysis of her recorded interviews showing that she often spoke more like Yvonne.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The extraordinary evidence simply isn't there, there's too much fog in which some thing could have happened where the daughter assumed the identity of her mother, for whatever reason. It could've been taxes, could've been something temporary that turned into something permanent. Hell, maybe she was a bored housewife and thought that cosplaying as a grandma would be fun. I'm sure she had a grand old time as a "90 year old" that was able to act like a spritely 60 year old.

I simply don't believe she was the oldest, although I do acknowledge there is a very slim possibility of it being true.

This is a scenario where science fails us, I think. Social scientists have "proved" she was the oldest with "99% accuracy". But Bayesian statistics would pose the question, "if the odds of being the world's oldest person are 1 in 5 billion, and you took a test that was 99% accurate that confirmed you were the oldest, what are the odds of you being the oldest if the test is positive?" It turns out the odds of you being the oldest person are still astronomically unlikely... you have better odds of winning the PowerBall than of being the world's oldest person.

The extraordinary claim here is that a 34 year old woman would impersonate her mother for decades, including living with her father, and no one would ever notice or say anything. Your perspective is like arresting anyone who wins the lotto for fraud, because it's more likely that they would cheat then just happen to guess the right numbers.

> including living with her father,

Mother and daughter lived side by side in the same building with their husbands. After the daughter passed and the grandson married he took that apartment, so Jeanne and her son-in-law cohabitated. Whichever explanation you choose you have to say that they were a close family who really liked their apartments.

There's no plausible way to cheat the lotto, every sold ticket is tracked.

There is a fairly plausible (and fairly ordinary) explanation for her extreme age (outstripping the next oldest by 3 years, and even with modern medicine and more people nobody is coming close to beating it).

Your Bayesian estimations make no sense. When the alternative is that it is the daughter who survived to 98 (which is already old) rather than the mother surviving to 122, the question should be phrased as "if you are older than 98 what is the probability that your age is 122".

The probability, except for her sole claim, is zero. Nobody has lived to 121 or even 120.

Well... a probability of zero is self-evidently incorrect.

> 1. The age gap between Calment and the next oldest person is the strongest evidence. It's very, very hard to ignore this.

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.

"Number of Olympic medals" is a very poor analogous concept here, because it's not a directly measurable and variable trait, it's a complex tail-end derivative of several factors.

If you looked at "swimming speed", for example, which is the simple directly measurable thing, you would find that while Phelps is faster than other swimmers, , he is only a tiny bit faster than the next fastest swimmer, not 2.5 times faster than the next fastest swimmer.

> "Number of Olympic medals" is a very poor analogous concept here, because it's not a directly measurable and variable trait, it's a complex tail-end derivative of several factors.

As if extreme longevity is not a complex tail-end derivative of several factors?

One is rank data, the other a continuous variable. Two very different sub-fields of statistics apply to the two kinds of data.

Well, so is swimming speed. I may not have the statistical terminology correct, but the difference is that "age" and "swimming speed" are directly measurable continuous aspects of reality, while "# of olympic medals is some kind of discretized derivative of others.

Imagine that instead of measuring "age" we measured "number of days person was the oldest person in the world". You'd get wildly divergent results for the latter that would be more like the olympic medal count.

Or if we determined how wet or dry a climate was not by measuring "annual rainfall" but, like "number of minutes per year in which more rain was falling here than other places".

Yeah, plus swimming is anomalous in and of itself due to the large number of very similar events.

I’m sure we’d see sprinters like Usain Bolt win a lot more medals if there were events like “100m in sandals, 100m on grass, 100m barefoot” to go along with the usual 100m race.

Bolt being Jamaican would indeed be strong favorite in "100m on grass" event.

A better analogy would be Usain Bolt's 0.11 gap in the 100m world dash record[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_metres#All-time_top_25_men

It depends on whether "living longer" is a continuous trait, I suppose.

I could imagine there being 20 or 30 genetic factors that affect your longevity, like whether you are susceptible to lung cancer from smoking.

Having a particular trait is a binary, which introduces the possibility for steps in the distribution; each slice of the population with a particular number of longevity factors has a certain distribution of actual lifespans that add together to form the observed life span, but the distribution of how many people have each distribution could decrease sharply; perhaps millions of people have 24 factors and produce centenarians, thousands have 25 factors and produce 110+, and dozens have 26 factors and produce 120+.

Such a model is entirely made up, pulled from my ass, but it is also quite compatible with our discrete genetics, and would be perfectly compatible with large gaps at the end of the distribution.

Age isn't directly measurable either. Or we would just measure the age of the person and have our answer.

Measuring age depends on records and tying records to people. Both of which are easily failable proceses.

I take your point that many measurements of age are faulty, but age is directly measurable the same way that "time to complete a swimming race" is directly measurable. It just takes a lot more patience to measure the former.

You can't test a swimmer after a race to see how fast they are either, but it's still a directly measurable quality.

The size of the data sample is massively different. Only a few thousand people have earned any Olympic medals, so variance is expected to be higher than in the "years lived" metric, where we have literally billions of data points.

And Calment did not live twice as long as the runner-up, so the variance is indeed much lower in the "years lived" metric.

The numbers are actually the other way around: there are far more Olympic medalists than there are people who (are believed to) have lived over 110.

One thing I would highlight, because this is what I've seen the French experts in this situation do, is look at each piece of evidence in isolation and say "Ha, this alone doesn't prove it."

And, to that point, I agree, it doesn't prove it (and, to clarify, I don't think the controversy is proven one way or the other). But I think it's wrong to look at each piece of evidence by itself - it's the totality of all the evidence that makes me extremely skeptical of the overall claim. E.g. if the age gap was the only piece of evidence, it wouldn't alone lead me to believe there was a swap, but all the evidence that Novoselov and Zak present together have convinced me of their theory.

Taking each word of your comment alone and not in relation to the other words around it I find that you're talking complete nonsense!

There's lots of people alive not an incredible amount shooting for swimming world records.

1. The age gap between Calment and the next oldest person is the strongest evidence. It's very, very hard to ignore this.

The age gap is is just a few years. not inconceivable at all.

I know that lots of people would discount this, but it's interesting to note that Jewish tradition holds that the maximum lifespan for a person is 120 years.

And Calment is the only person that might have exceeded this. To me that's another bit of evidence toward the impersonation theory.

This belief is commonly held by Christians as well. It comes from Genesis 6:3: “The LORD said, ‘My Spirit will not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; so his days will be one hundred twenty years.’”

At that point, Genesis had described several individuals as having lifespans in the hundreds of years, most famously Methuselah at 969 years. This is sometime before the Flood. Note that interpreting this verse as a lifespan limit is not universal—an alternative reading (possibly a more popular one) is that 120 years in this context refers to how many years were left until the Flood.

After the Flood, Genesis continues to describe individuals with long lifespans, but they decline rapidly. Abraham, for example, died at 175, ten generations after Noah. Later, in the post‐Exodus era, Deuteronomy says that Moses died at age 120.

At this point I'm willing to believe any theory that the "experts" are scrambling to to hide

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