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