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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.

> 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.

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

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.

> 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

"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%