Headline of the Washington Post today reads: The world’s oldest woman was 122 when she died. A researcher says she was lying about her age. Here’s an excerpt from the Post:
The Russian mathematician is casting doubt on her record. Nikolay Zak, of the Moscow Center For Continuous Mathematical Education, said in a report that he believes Calment was actually Yvonne Calment, Jeanne’s daughter, who Zak says assumed her mother’s identity to avoid inheritance taxes in the 1930s. That would have made her 99 when she died.
The evidence produced by Zak in a paper published recently on the portal ResearchGate is not definitive.
I just got through browsing the link above, and I believe that Professor Zak’s work is both comprehensive and convincing. This was my comment to the Post article
I have long doubted that she had lived to be 122 based on theoretical statistics. Take any model of vital elements required for existence - be it biological life or an analogue - a machine with millions of essential parts, each with an average life span. You could create such a model where the average age is 70 yrs, and only one in a billion reach 116, with an ordered probability. If you have a billion iterations you will have several who reach this limit.
Then we discover a single such contraptions-model that exceeds this "limit" not by .1% or even 1% which could be plausible, but by 4%. The probability of surviving a single year at 105 is less than even, which would decline after that.
The argument for Ms Calment's not reaching this age may be flawed, But when tens of billions of other humans have not transcended 117 years of life, one single person surviving not 1 year, or 3 years, but 4 more years without the failure of a single of the multitude of vital systems is a much lower probability -- lower than the alternative, that Ms Calment had fooled the world (and the owner of that condo) - which is a rather common occurrence.
This segment from the Zaks article, that is equivalent to about ten pages includes a survey of the art and science of confirmation of record years of life. (There have been hundreds of claims of such extended life, all of which have been proven false) Mr Zak’s conclusion faces some strong headwind, shown in the paragraph above from the Post making the point his research is “not definitive.” Jeanne Calment, with her joie de vivre right up to the time she died peacefully in her sleep gave all of us hope that old age, even at the extremes, need not be suffering and despair.
Validation of age can be difficult, as I don’t know the year when my own mother was born! It was around the turn of the 20th century, but all she knew was it was “two weeks after suvcouth” (a Jewish Holiday) defined by the Jewish Calendar, and in Poland (the area may have still been under the Gregorian Calendar) There’s more. She was older than her husband, so she cut off a few years. I know this because my Aunt Lena, who had an official document from her elementary school giving her birth date of 1903, tells of getting lost at the Baltimore port of entry and calling to her big sister (my mother) who found her. (She lived to just a bit short of 110, which explains my interest in longevity)
There is really no further definitive research that can be done on Jeanne Calment’s years to validate whether it was actual, or just a very shrewd 70 year old who found a way to beat the system, by pretending to be her own dead mother. Jeanne’s body is cremated and the witnesses are long gone. The full report by Mr. (Professor?) Zak is available to study, but be warned, it’s a research level tome, which has eaten my Saturday morning.
Wikipedia — go at it!
