13 ms·

Jeanne Calment’s 122-year old longevity record may be fake (2018)

146 points by briefcomment 5y ago

rscoots 5y ago
I remember seeing this article awhile back. Really made me realize that sometimes simple, trivial things that everyone takes as fact really cannot be trusted. The notion that Coco the gorilla could do sign language was another one that stuck with me. Anyways, I think the best evidence 'against' Jeanne is that no other super-old person simply looked (both outwardly and physiologically) like someone 20 years thier junior. All the medical evidence points to her not actually being the age she claimed she was. I'm of the opinion the 2nd place woman is also not legitimate. She probably just lied about her age so she could marry and then lived incredibly long. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Knauss https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Knauss
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  There's the observation that the one modern social phenomenon that's been most strongly associated with a reduction in the number of superannuated persons in a population is accurate demographic recordkeeping. See, e.g., https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/06/are-supercentenarians-mostly-superfrauds/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/06/are-superc... Source paper: "Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1
  - xdennis 5y ago
    This is like the UFO observation: camera sensors have improved, but UFO videos stay the same (low details and ambiguous).
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      That raises a possible / probable principle for discerning between rare observations on the one hand and unjustified ones on the other, and a chief limitation of empiricism. Empiricism rests on the assumption that the Universe and phenomena in it are fundamentally observable. Which means that phenomena generate some kind of interaction with their surroundings. Observability is depenent on the frequency, strength, certainty (as opposed to ambiguity), of those interactions. There's a strong association between the sensibility of phenomenon (our ability to see, hear, smell, feel, or taste it directly) and its believability, though also with recordability. "Capturing something", on film, tape, audio, or other sensing devices, is key to demonstrable proof. (In its absence we're mostly limited to testimony or second-hand accounts. Durer's Rhinocerous is a wonderful example of a second-hand account, visualised in detail. It's almost dreamlike, startlingly accurate in some particulars, oddly off in others.) Empiricism does most poorly with rare or hard-to-sense phenomena. Literal black swans, neutrinos, the interior of the Earth, subatomic particles, the boundaries of the Universe, interiors of stars, black holes and neutron stars (massive, but not very emissive). Or the very long ago (think evolution and geology). Epidemiology and statistical methods for rare and distributed events. Various sensing, visualisation, microscopy, telescopy, tomographic, and other methods. Even in cases of very difficult-to-sense phenomena, though empiricism tends to improve in its resolving capability with time and improvement of methods. And where those capabilities improve, rare-but-real phenomena are more revealed over time. The distant (or small, or remote in time, or hard to percieve) becomes clearer. Presumed-extinct species are found. Hidden structures within the Earth are visualised, and correlated with other events (see the evolution of the concept of plate tectonics, one of my favourite instances). Where the phenomenon is not real, though ... it either decreases in prevalence (mostly in the case of frauds), or in the case of "edge-of-perception" sensing, in which random noise is mistaken (or hallucinated) as actual, remains roughly constant over time. Spellling all this out, I'm all but certain there's an established concept built around this (or several). Though it seems a useful heuristic in determinng likely validity or falsity of phenomena given enhanced sensing or recording capabilities. UFOs have remained frustratingly ellusive. Meteorites have become stunningly compelling. Footage of accidents, abuses of power, or casual racism are now starkly evident (if often undeterred by the fact of video). And so on.
    - fiftyacorn 5y ago
      Or ghosts
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        Pretty much anything now seen as paranormal activity. Though I've been trying to come up with counterexamples --- thins previuosly thought fantastical or unlikely now known to be real. I'd illustrated a bloggish version of my comment above with Albrecht Durer's Rinocerous --- he'd drawn that from second-hand reports (and a poor-quality sketch). It's clearly not right, but it's also not entirely wrong, and the mix of "details captured well" with "where did that come from" is fascinating. Lightning sprites are another that comes to mind, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning)
        lovemenot 5y ago
        Albrecht Durer's Rinocerous: nice. I never saw it before. Looks like someone said it was armoured so Durer went to the local armoury for inspiration. Puts me in mind of a Deep Dream image. https://deepdreamgenerator.com/ https://deepdreamgenerator.com/ A good story about the duck-billed platypus, which was believed apocrophal for a long time. https://gizmodo.com/legendary-cryptids-that-turned-out-to-be-absolutely-rea-5814976 https://gizmodo.com/legendary-cryptids-that-turned-out-to-be...
        dredmorbius 5y ago
        Duck-billed platypus is an excellent example, as well as the class of instances: cryptids. Thanks. And yes, Durer's image is one that just grows on you. I've known of it since I was a child. It just keeps getting better. There is some Deep Dream feeling about it --- being told that there's something there, so you find it regardless of whether or not it actually is. Try staring at a field of raw static for a while. (This used to be easier when television was an analogue broadcast, I'm not sure what the easiest source is now. Inkblots are another possible option.)
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    HN discussion of the biorxiv paper on Aug 6, 2019 (227 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625547
- joshuaissac 5y ago
  > I'm of the opinion the 2nd place woman is also not legitimate. She probably just lied about her age so she could marry and then lived incredibly long. From that link: > The 1891 directory records that the 1890 US census listed Sarah D. Clark as age 10, which is roughly consistent with a September 1880 birth date.
  - rscoots 5y ago
    Yea, looks like that source came out Dec 2019 which is after I first looked into this. Very interesting & well written write up! Even though Wikipedia says "Better source needed" for whatever reason. The author still casts a good amount of doubt on her claim though, and even assuming the existing evidence is correct she still couldve been 116 it says. But yea as long as you don't have birth certificates or baptism records I guess that would always be true.
- astrange 5y ago
  > Really made me realize that sometimes simple, trivial things that everyone takes as fact really cannot be trusted. One I've noticed is "Einstein was super smart" when a simpler theory is "Einstein didn't cite prior work so everyone thought he did it."
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    Einstein was a patent clerk. A patent office is basically a library of ideas. So he was paid to study ideas in detail day after day for years. Likely some of his ideas on relativity came from train scheduling patents frequently requested at the time since railroad companies were going pan-European. FYI: Elite VCs pay people to basically do what Einstein did: study new ideas and trends all day. There are a few US market intelligence companies like 451 Group that can write mind-blowing reports. (Their early Android predictions report delivered at one of the O'Reilly Conferences proved to be very accurate.)
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    >One I've noticed is "Einstein was super smart" when a simpler theory is "Einstein didn't cite prior work so everyone thought he did it." What prior work? Most of the discussion about Einstein's theories not being original and not being credited seem to relate to his first wife, I thought.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
laurensr 5y ago
From the article, albeit a bit... buried: There is a petition to exhume the bodies and confirm the identity theft https://www.change.org/p/m-emmanuel-macron-p%C3%A9tition-en-faveur-de-l-exhumation-des-corps-de-jeanne-et-yvonne-calment-300e3b0c-4ab7-4bdf-b0bc-df40fc9c6487 https://www.change.org/p/m-emmanuel-macron-p%C3%A9tition-en-...
- chrisbolt 5y ago
  Has a change.org petition ever done... anything?
  - lallysingh 5y ago
    It makes the petitioners feel like they've done something.
  - stavros 5y ago
    My petition to stop petitions from achieving anything has been a wild success.
    - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      Where do I sign?
      - stavros 5y ago
        http://chng.it/LFQSp5nc7r http://chng.it/LFQSp5nc7r
  - eloisius 5y ago
    Signing a peittion earned me so spam one time that it helped motivate me to move my email from gmail.com to my own domain, so I'd say it's not useless.
    - lovemenot 5y ago
      I down-voted you, in the hope that it'll spur you on to even greater things.
Bayart 5y ago
A minor pet peeve of mine : I would like English-speaking writers to stop using the term « Victorian » for places that are not Britain or the British Empire. There was no Queen Victoria, no Victorian era, no Victorian spirit in France. Indeed it was a time of humiliation, political instability and rampant nationalism, albeit on a canvas of industry.
- david-gpu 5y ago
  It's a bit like asking people not to use the Gregorian calendar in places that are not predominantly Christian. We have to adapt our language to the person we are communicating with, and if they are familiar with the time frame associated with Queen Victoria, I can see how it makes sense to use it. We could refer to the period of Isabella II of Spain, but they wouldn't understand us, so it would be rather pointless.
  - skissane 5y ago
    > It's a bit like asking people not to use the Gregorian calendar in places that are not predominantly Christian. I think it is different in that numbering years is useful, and we need to have an agreed starting point, and by historical accident we've all adopted an estimated (likely slightly incorrect) birth year for the founder of one of the world's major religions. It is hard to pick a culturally-neutral starting point – astronomers sometimes use the Julian period starting at 4713 BCE, but while that is more religiously neutral it still isn't culturally neutral. (It is based partially on astronomy, but also partly on the taxation cycle of the ancient Roman Empire, and that's still Western-centric.) By contrast, applying names to periods of time is far less useful and far less portable across cultures. The 1800s looked very different in different parts of the world, but it was the same 100 year span everywhere. And we only do this for a handful of historical periods anyway (most seem to be named after British monarchs – Victorian, Georgian, Edwardian, etc). Applying those period names to places outside the British Empire is a bit like applying Japanese era names to European history. The whole thing of historical era names seems to be somewhat dying anyway – references to decades (the 1990s, the 1920s, etc) seems more popular in discussing more recent history – the Elizabethan era was in the 16th and very early 17th century, not in the 20th and early 21st. > We have to adapt our language to the person we are communicating with, and if they are familiar with the time frame associated with Queen Victoria, I can see how it makes sense to use it. We could refer to the period of Isabella II of Spain, but they wouldn't understand us, so it would be rather pointless. "mid-to-late 19th century" covers roughly the same timeframe, and everyone knows what that is.
laurent123456 5y ago
If this theory is true I guess it means she died at around 100, which is still honourable. It would have been interesting if she had lived to 120 like a real supercentenarian, which means the fake age of 142. Then at least we would have been sure that something's off.
- jobigoud 5y ago
  > she had lived to 120 like a real supercentenarian The point is that no one ever lived to 120 in a provable way, so it's not something that could have happened to the daughter. Also in the swap hypothesis Yvonne made it to 99, not 100.
j_leboulanger 5y ago
I feel like the pictures shown on the article demonstrate the opposite of the author theory. When the author writes things like "undeniable", the resemblance is more questionable than undeniable when he tries to match the pictures of Yvonne with the ones of the 122 years old women. I was not convinced at all by the article. Moreover in such a rich family in France, changing identity like this would have been spotted really quickly.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  I agree that some of the photo comparisons were weird. The rest however was indeed very convincing to me. Mismatched eye color, height and appearance untypical of that age, and cognitive tests that estimated a much younger age? That's not something you can just discard imho, and those are the metrics you can hardly fake. > changing identity like this would have been spotted really quickly. Unless the people close to her didn't have an interest in spilling the beans.
  - phpnode 5y ago
    If it was fraud, it was likely mail fraud, at least at first. That is to say, the people closest around her would not necessarily have known that she was claiming to be Jeanne - the family only had to have a death certificate issued in Yvonne's name, everything else could have continued as normal. And when she did finally have to publicly assume Jeanne's identity enough time had passed that few people would remember her mother.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      But still, there is proof that people in that time believed that Yvonne had been sick, and died. Would they have buried Jeanne under her daughter's name and no one noticed?
- patall 5y ago
  > Moreover in such a rich family in France, changing identity like this would have been spotted really quickly. She sold her apartment for a fixed per month amount. Sure, you need to have the apartment in the first place but that doesn't sound rich to me. Further, if my neighbor dies, I do not have any insights in the paperwork. So at that point, I only know that that nice older lady from upstairs died. If you then ask me 60 years later if that older lady was the mother or the daughter, I am not sure I would know. Besides, I would probably be proud of someone like her in my neighborhood, so I might be careful to refute her. Afterall, you get a lot of prestige from having the longest lived person in your country, city or neighborhood.
trishika 5y ago
https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/74/Supplement_1/S13/5569844 https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/74/Supple...
- phpnode 5y ago
  I didn't find this refutation especially convincing, and the way it is presented makes it seem ideologically motivated. The underlying argument in that article is that the people around Calment would have known that Yvonne is not Jeanne, and therefore they would have been caught. An alternative explanation is that the people around Calment knew nothing of her claiming to be Jeanne at all until much later on in her life. By which time the only people who knew about the fraudulent claim would be either very old themselves, or sympathetic to the situation an old and dear friend or family member has found themselves in. The only way to know for sure would be DNA testing.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    > An alternative explanation is that the people around Calment knew nothing of her claiming to be Jeanne at all until much later on in her life. By which time the only people who knew about the fraudulent claim would be either very old themselves, or sympathetic to the situation an old and dear friend or family member has found themselves in. This doesn't make sense - there is witness testimony and other records attesting that Yvonne, the daughter, died. Her husband sought leave from the military to be by her side.
- thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
  This is not convincing >It is not reasonable to claim that she could provide, for example, the names of JC’s godparents based upon her recollection of what she might have read many years previously in an attempt to maintain a fraud. Yes, it is. That's the best example?
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Here is a better quote[0] from Robine in Le Parisien: > On a eu accès à des informations qu'elle seule pouvait connaître, comme le nom de ses professeurs de mathématiques ou de bonnes passées par l'immeuble. On lui a posé des questions sur ces sujets. Soit elle ne se souvenait plus, soit elle a répondu juste. Sa fille n'aurait pas pu savoir ça. "We have had access to information that only she [Jeanne] could have known, such as the name of her math teachers or of nannys who passed through the building. We have asked her questions on such subjects. She either didn't remember them, or she answered correctly. Her daughter [Yvonne] wouldn't have had how to know these things." Things like math teachers' names and nannys seem much more convincing to me. It's not impossible to know them, but I can tell you for sure I don't know such things about my mother, and I am about the age Yvonne was when she died (or when her mother would have died if we believe this theory). [0] https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/jeanne-calment-une-imposture-le-scientifique-qui-a-valide-son-record-s-insurge-30-12-2018-7978578.php https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/jeanne-calment-une-impostu...
lacker 5y ago
I am convinced that Jeanne Calment was actually two people. She is a fairly strange outlier in the record of the oldest people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe... The oldest person on record is Jeanne at 122, then one 119, then one 118, then the next seven are at 117, then the next thirteen are at 116. She's just an extreme outlier from the rest of the distribution. Also, in the 25 years since Calment, the distribution of subsequent extremely old people has seemed unchanged. Nobody has gotten any closer to Calment, although we've had far more people in the 114-117 range. It all points to a faked data point.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  How can we be sure it's not a natural outlier?
  - fungiblecog 5y ago
    From the evidence presented in this article
    - beaner 5y ago
      It's evidence, not certainty.
    - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
      But there is no evidence in the article, only speculation and poorly done Bayesian statistics.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  When this hypothesis first came out, I remember looking into it a lot, specifically looking into the rebuttals from Western European researchers that poo-poo'ed the Russians' theories. I remember the thing that struck me was how defensive without evidence the rebuttals sounded to me. I mean, the rebuttals kept pointing out how there was all this documentary evidence to show that Jeanne Calment was 122, but of course all of that documentary evidence would still exist if it were actually evidence from her mother. I never found any convincing rebuttals of (a) the sheer outlier-ness of Jeanne's age, nor any of the more suspicious actions like some of the burned documents from her family. FWIW I think the jury is definitely still out, but I would take the "Jeanne was 2 people" bet 9 ways to Sunday if it could be proven with DNA evidence.
alain94040 5y ago
Debunked, see study mentioned in https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49746060 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49746060
- thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
  I've read it, it's linked above. I am not convinced.
arnaudsm 5y ago
Fake supercentenarians have been used by multiple governments in the past to glorify their lifestyle. USSR did the same, claiming that Shirali Muslimov reached 168. China also has fake "longevity villages" that draw some tourism.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Interestingly, this is specifically posited in the section about insurance fraud. It seems like incentives to protect the scam from discovery kept expanding the longer the scam went on.
kevinpet 5y ago
I read up on this when the article first came out, and what really stood out was the way the supports of Calment's claim / debunkers of the new theory would ignore how their supposed evidence did or did not fit in. IIRC, the Guinness authenticator talked a lot about how they authenticated the birth records and other types of records, which is irrelevant to this particular claim.
- thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
  Having briefly looked it up now, I agree. For gerontologists, I can imagine a strong social pressure not to break kayfabe about the jewel of the field. If I'm generous and assume the field is as rigourous as medicine or history, I have to compare it to how frequently those fields have been mistaken. I put zero stock into Guinness World Records. I'm not convinced by the evidence in the link because it's hard to make judgements about so long in the past. But that's exactly why suspicion should be the default stance, with such financial incentives to inflate one's age. For me, claiming that people would have spotted the switch or attacking the qualifications of the authors isn't enough.
fieryskiff11 5y ago
Evidence That Jeanne Calment Died in 1934—Not 1997 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6424156/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6424156/
adolph 5y ago
For a moment I thought the claim was Calment was a chimera as well as a long-lived person. A chimera is essentially a single organism that's made up of cells from two or more "individuals"—that is, it contains two sets of DNA, with the code to make two separate organisms. One way that chimeras can happen naturally in humans is that a fetus can absorb its twin. This can occur with fraternal twins, if one embryo dies very early in pregnancy, and some of its cells are "absorbed" by the other twin. The remaining fetus will have two sets of cells, its own original set, plus the one from its twin. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/3-human-chimeras-that-already-exist/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/3-human-chimeras-... Unfortunately the claim is more like identity theft. Much less interesting biologically. This article outlines four types of known human chimeras: https://www.healthline.com/health/chimerism https://www.healthline.com/health/chimerism
layoutIfNeeded 5y ago
“In 1942, Jeanne’s husband (Yvonne’s father) died from cherry poisoning” Wait, what? Cherry poisoning??
- ectopod 5y ago
  Apricot kernels, bitter almonds and cherry stones all contain amygdalin, which releases cyanide if you eat it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry#Health_risks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry#Health_risks
  - layoutIfNeeded 5y ago
    Strangely, I remember eating tons of dried apricot kernels as a kid with no ill effects. We were eating them like almonds…
    - sitharus 5y ago
      That’s because the human body can metabolise a small quantity of cyanide. Going by Wikipedia sweet apricot kernels produce ~0.3mg of cyanide when eaten, but the toxic threshold is around 100mg for acute effects. Still, chronic cyanide exposure isn’t good for you.
- hughdbrown 5y ago
  Cherries and apples have seeds with traces of a cyanide derivative that can be converted in the stomach. > Cherries have a small, hardened pit that surrounds their seed, also called a kernel. The kernels of cherry pits and other stone fruits contain the chemical amygdalin. Amygdalin is a cyanogenic glycoside — a chemical that your body converts into the toxic compound hydrogen cyanide. In Ozark episode S2E19, Darlene poisons her husband Jacob's coffee with ground cherry pits, for a current cultural reference.
  - mc32 5y ago
    You have to eat quite a few to experience ill effects. One or two are not going to kill you. A couple of dozen will. I've cracked and eaten a cherry pit. It was strangely tasty.
Mvandenbergh 5y ago
I recently read the New Yorker article on this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-calment-the-oldest-person-who-ever-lived-or-a-fraud https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-cal... which is very long and very worth reading and which I think gives both the "yes" and "no" sides a fair shake. Some key takeaways (my interpretation anyway): -Yes, she looked startlingly young for someone her age in many pictures -The extremity of how old she got is really surprising, considering that we can make distributional assumptions about age and that the existence of Jeanne Calment would imply that we should see quite a few other people at ages slightly less than hers and the next oldest is three years younger. These are both surprising but not really independently so - it can hardly be surprising that someone who lives to an astounding age might look younger than they would be expected to. Most of the other evidence, in particular her occasional slips mixing up father and husband have no real evidentiary value. Confusing relatives with each other is something that people with incipient memory failure do literally all the time. However, I also think that the "two people" / "daughter swap" hypothesis, doesn't stand up to inspection very well. Specifically, the problem with it is that there is quite a lot of recorded testimony and recollections from people who absolutely would have known both of them, had no reason to lie, and were quite clear that they were different people. Specifically in that article:- Claudine Serena (or more particularly her mother and grandfather) Freddy who was seven when his mother Yvonne died - can a seven year old keep up the pretence that his mother is his grandmother successfully? Gilberte Mery who recalls the tradition of the promenades and the degree to which Arlesian bourgeois were constantly watching each other The notary who administered Jeanne's and Yvonne's marriage contracts and then later carried out real estate transactions for Jeanne Yvonne's husband requested leave from the army on the grounds of his wife's serious illness (and we have records of that) Yvonne had a substantial public funeral, which would have involved viewing of the corpse by the very large number of prominent local people who knew her I went into that article thinking that this would certainly be fake but came out thinking that faking this would have been completely impossible. There were just way too many people, many with no interest in perpetuating a lie, who would have had to go along with this - long before any possible motive about the world's oldest woman. As to motive, apparently actual inheritance taxes would have been not the 34% in the OP but a mere 6% - an easy mistake to make if you don't have access to century old French inheritance tax law but a pretty important difference. Incidentally, the role of Aubrey de Grey is very amusing in that article - it is pretty clear that he doesn't actually take the impostor theory too seriously but is using it as a tool in order to get his hands on the DNA sample which obviously makes sense given his interests. To quote from the article: Either she had lived longer than any human being ever or she had executed an audacious fraud. As one observer wrote, “Both are highly unlikely life stories but one is true.”
hattmall 5y ago
Kind of wild then that the bible says man will not live more than 120 years. Makes me wonder how many ancient people approached that age.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Meh, good thing she was a woman then.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    Aren't there two kinds of man, the wer and the wyf?
    - Y_Y 5y ago
      So Proto-Europeans had same-sex marriage? (Alas no mention of nonbynari-man)
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  Probably just a local aphorism stemming from a sexagesimal culture. 60 year olds exist, so 2x 60 is the limit.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Life expectancy is weird… even with low life expectancy of the 1700s, if you made it to 65, youd likely hit 75.
ahurmazda 5y ago
I know its impossible but I still like to imagine that amongst the billions of people born over millennia, maybe one or two were age-mutants. They lived for hundreds of years. Did not see the point in convincing others of their age (may even thought it might be dangerous). Grew tired. Bored. And died eventually.
- nuclearwast 5y ago
  This is the plot of the movie "The Man from Earth" It's well rated, I would say it's worth at least a watch.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    And when you watch it do not expect an action movie, it is more of a brain tease asking the 'What if?' question in a pretty effective way. I liked it a lot, but most of the people that I recommended it to did not and found it boring.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  When I trip slightly, step on something and hurt my toe, that sort of thing, it makes me think that even if I somehow wasn't to age or get a fatal illness, that given long enough, it's statistically certain I will fall down the stairs and die or something like that. Probability produces mortality completely independent of human physiology. If your risk of death flattens out, but is not zero, then your expected lifespan is very finite. I think some people have claimed that exceptionally long lived people do end up with a constant (albeit high) risk of death per year rather than an increasing one. It's a little bit sad to think that nothing remotely human could possibly see what the world will be like in a million years, let alone a billion. We could all be 20 years old permanently, and we'd still only live a few thousand years.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_of_St._Germain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_of_St._Germain https://pelicanstateofmind.com/louisiana-love/jacques-st-germain-louisiana-vampire/ https://pelicanstateofmind.com/louisiana-love/jacques-st-ger... This story fascinates me. I recently went to New Orleans and happened to walk by Jacques’ house; I saw the current owner snoozing in an armchair with a book. Later I went down the rabbit hole of the Count’s life and how he seems to be the progenitor of so many things and legends in modern society.
dredmorbius 5y ago
See: "Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans" In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. In Italy, which has more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by low per capita incomes and a short life expectancy. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625547 (6 August 2019, 227 comments)
- VintageCool 5y ago
  A number of people in the linked thread point out that Sardinia has a very low crime rate. However, the relevant metric is crime rate decades ago -- Yvonne Calment is imputed to have committed this fraud starting in 1934. 70 years ago, Sardinia had a reputation for banditry, sheep rustling (which turned to kidnapping), vendettas, and resistance to the State. The island does fit the pattern, despite having mellowed out to an extremely low crime rate today.
  - 11235813213455 5y ago
    yea, similar to their northern neighbor of Corsica, they can be a little bit more nationalist and defensive, understandable for islanders, and overall very pacifists
  - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    > Yvonne Calment is imputed to have committed this fraud starting in 1934. But France as one of the global powers has a very low crime rate in the 30s and the Calments are notable from their region not random unknown. If you think about it, the whole thing doesn't make much sense. Yvonne Calment should somehow have decided to replace her mother for sixty years including twenty while her husband was still alive for unclear reasons (a far fetched motive involving taxes was only found after Zay started pushing his theory) successfuly fooling the French state. The whole thing doesn't make any sense. I don't understand how Zay was published (I mean, I do, it took him a decade to find a bad enough journal but it's sad) and I don't know why serious people are wasting their time arguing with him. At this point, I just wish the genetic analysis were done to close the whole thing.
jasode 5y ago
The excerpt from wikipedia with paragraphs refuting this thread's blog post's theory is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Skepticism_regarding_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Skepticism_rega... >[...], the theory had attracted widespread media attention since 30 December 2018 after a series of postings on Medium titled "J'Accuse!" by gerontology blogger Yuri Deigin went viral.[27][28][29] This theory, however, is considered weak by mainstream longevity experts, such as French gerontologist Jean-Marie Robine.[30] >Robine, a French gerontologist and one of two validators of Calment, dismissed the claims and pointed out that during his research Calment had correctly answered questions about things that her daughter could not have known first hand.[31][32] Robine also dismissed the idea that the residents of Arles could have been duped by the switch.[32][33] Michel Allard, the second doctor who helped verify Calment's records, said that the team had considered the identity switch theory while Jeanne was still alive because she looked younger than her daughter in photographs, but similar discrepancies in the rates of aging are commonly found in families with centenarian members.[8] Allard and Robine also pointed out the existence of numerous documents relating to Calment's activities throughout her life, and that the Russians brought no evidence forward to support their hypothesis.[8] >After a meeting of the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris on 23 January 2019, French, Swiss, and Belgian longevity experts concluded that none of the Russian claimants provided any proof of an identity substitution, [...]
- thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
  >Calment had correctly answered questions about things that her daughter could not have known first hand. Does anybody know the primary source for this? What did she know?
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    I'm pretty skeptical of this line of reasoning. How is there any knowledge a mother couldn't have told her daughter?
    - spoonjim 5y ago
chestertn 5y ago
That would be very cool. There is this passage in Genesis [1]: "And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years." If you read the list of verified oldest people [2], the only person surpassing 120 is her. I wonder if in ancient times they had some statistics and they found out there is some sort of hard limit to human lifespan. [1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%206%3A3&version=KJV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%206%3A3... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...
camkego 5y ago
"Given that after age 100 the annual probability of dying is about 1/2, the chances of a centenarian living to 122 are incredibly small." Small rant about this statement. The annual probability of dying is not determined by a fair coin flip. (at over 100 years) It is determined by the physical world. That number, .5 chance of dying is the result of a model to predict the chance that someone over 100 will die. So, to say that "the chances of a centenarian living to 122 are incredibly small.", is to say, the chances of living beyond one hundred are determined by a model's output, and not the physical world. You certainly could say that based on empirical evidence, people hitting over 120 is very unlikely.
- munchler 5y ago
  The model doesn't even support their conclusion. It's true that the chances of any particular centenarian living that long are "incredibly small", but the picture changes when we think about them as a group: * Chances of any given 100 year-old dying before age 122 (according to this model): 1 - 1/(2 ^ 22) = 1 - 1/4,194,304 = 99.999976%. * Number of centenarians currently alive: ~573,000 * Chances that all living centenarians will die before age 122: (1 - 1/4,194,304) ^ ~573,000 = ~87%. (I've hand-waved a bit here, but it's close enough.) So, according to this model, there's roughly a 13% chance that at least one current centenarian will live to 122. I would actually say this model is too optimistic.
  - Someone 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz–Makeham_law_of_mortality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz–Makeham_law_of_mortal...: “The Gompertz–Makeham law states that the human death rate is the sum of an age-dependent component (the Gompertz function, named after Benjamin Gompertz), which increases exponentially with age[2] and an age-independent component (the Makeham term, named after William Makeham)” I think it’s possible they badly described this model. Now, that’s an empirical law. There’s evidence that it overestimates probability of dying for centenarians. A recent article (https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol44/52/default.htm https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol44/52/defaul...) uses a different model, compares it with actuarial data, and concludes: “Based on the Bayesian analysis, there is a greater than 99% probability that the current MRAD of 122 will be broken by 2100. We estimate the probabilities that a person lives to at least age 126, 128, or 130 this century, as 89%, 44%, and 13%, respectively.”
anonu 5y ago
Nice little forensic analysis. I definitely enjoyed reading it. But... who cares?
boudin 5y ago
Note that after this article was published, a few more scientific articles confirmed her longevity record, as mentionned in her wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment
throwawayswede 5y ago
Considering how difficult it is to verify information +200 years old and how likely it is that theories based on some information would fall apart if one piece turns out to be a fake or a lie, I wonder how much we actually know about history, or more like, what's the amount of lies we believe and live by everyday thinking it's undeniable truth because a group of "experts" thought it is.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  Knowledge and the theory of it should not be based on absolute truths but on what we know, how we k ow it and the limits of that knowledge.
bloak 5y ago
I'd put my money on it being a fake. Maybe I'm cynical, but the refusal to provide DNA plus the deliberate destruction of photos seems fairly significant to me. Years ago huge amounts were written about a woman who claimed to be Anastasia of the Romanovs. Lots of discussion, lots of detailed evidence, but when I read the bit about how she refused to ever speak Russian I knew which way I'd bet on that one.

146 points by briefcomment 5y ago

I remember seeing this article awhile back. Really made me realize that sometimes simple, trivial things that everyone takes as fact really cannot be trusted. The notion that Coco the gorilla could do sign language was another one that stuck with me. Anyways, I think the best evidence 'against' Jeanne is that no other super-old person simply looked (both outwardly and physiologically) like someone 20 years thier junior. All the medical evidence points to her not actually being the age she claimed she was. I'm of the opinion the 2nd place woman is also not legitimate. She probably just lied about her age so she could marry and then lived incredibly long. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Knauss https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Knauss

dredmorbius 5y ago
There's the observation that the one modern social phenomenon that's been most strongly associated with a reduction in the number of superannuated persons in a population is accurate demographic recordkeeping. See, e.g., https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/06/are-supercentenarians-mostly-superfrauds/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/06/are-superc... Source paper: "Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1
- xdennis 5y ago
  This is like the UFO observation: camera sensors have improved, but UFO videos stay the same (low details and ambiguous).
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    That raises a possible / probable principle for discerning between rare observations on the one hand and unjustified ones on the other, and a chief limitation of empiricism. Empiricism rests on the assumption that the Universe and phenomena in it are fundamentally observable. Which means that phenomena generate some kind of interaction with their surroundings. Observability is depenent on the frequency, strength, certainty (as opposed to ambiguity), of those interactions. There's a strong association between the sensibility of phenomenon (our ability to see, hear, smell, feel, or taste it directly) and its believability, though also with recordability. "Capturing something", on film, tape, audio, or other sensing devices, is key to demonstrable proof. (In its absence we're mostly limited to testimony or second-hand accounts. Durer's Rhinocerous is a wonderful example of a second-hand account, visualised in detail. It's almost dreamlike, startlingly accurate in some particulars, oddly off in others.) Empiricism does most poorly with rare or hard-to-sense phenomena. Literal black swans, neutrinos, the interior of the Earth, subatomic particles, the boundaries of the Universe, interiors of stars, black holes and neutron stars (massive, but not very emissive). Or the very long ago (think evolution and geology). Epidemiology and statistical methods for rare and distributed events. Various sensing, visualisation, microscopy, telescopy, tomographic, and other methods. Even in cases of very difficult-to-sense phenomena, though empiricism tends to improve in its resolving capability with time and improvement of methods. And where those capabilities improve, rare-but-real phenomena are more revealed over time. The distant (or small, or remote in time, or hard to percieve) becomes clearer. Presumed-extinct species are found. Hidden structures within the Earth are visualised, and correlated with other events (see the evolution of the concept of plate tectonics, one of my favourite instances). Where the phenomenon is not real, though ... it either decreases in prevalence (mostly in the case of frauds), or in the case of "edge-of-perception" sensing, in which random noise is mistaken (or hallucinated) as actual, remains roughly constant over time. Spellling all this out, I'm all but certain there's an established concept built around this (or several). Though it seems a useful heuristic in determinng likely validity or falsity of phenomena given enhanced sensing or recording capabilities. UFOs have remained frustratingly ellusive. Meteorites have become stunningly compelling. Footage of accidents, abuses of power, or casual racism are now starkly evident (if often undeterred by the fact of video). And so on.
  - fiftyacorn 5y ago
    Or ghosts
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Pretty much anything now seen as paranormal activity. Though I've been trying to come up with counterexamples --- thins previuosly thought fantastical or unlikely now known to be real. I'd illustrated a bloggish version of my comment above with Albrecht Durer's Rinocerous --- he'd drawn that from second-hand reports (and a poor-quality sketch). It's clearly not right, but it's also not entirely wrong, and the mix of "details captured well" with "where did that come from" is fascinating. Lightning sprites are another that comes to mind, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning)
      - lovemenot 5y ago
        Albrecht Durer's Rinocerous: nice. I never saw it before. Looks like someone said it was armoured so Durer went to the local armoury for inspiration. Puts me in mind of a Deep Dream image. https://deepdreamgenerator.com/ https://deepdreamgenerator.com/ A good story about the duck-billed platypus, which was believed apocrophal for a long time. https://gizmodo.com/legendary-cryptids-that-turned-out-to-be-absolutely-rea-5814976 https://gizmodo.com/legendary-cryptids-that-turned-out-to-be...
        dredmorbius 5y ago
        Duck-billed platypus is an excellent example, as well as the class of instances: cryptids. Thanks. And yes, Durer's image is one that just grows on you. I've known of it since I was a child. It just keeps getting better. There is some Deep Dream feeling about it --- being told that there's something there, so you find it regardless of whether or not it actually is. Try staring at a field of raw static for a while. (This used to be easier when television was an analogue broadcast, I'm not sure what the easiest source is now. Inkblots are another possible option.)
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  HN discussion of the biorxiv paper on Aug 6, 2019 (227 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625547
joshuaissac 5y ago
> I'm of the opinion the 2nd place woman is also not legitimate. She probably just lied about her age so she could marry and then lived incredibly long. From that link: > The 1891 directory records that the 1890 US census listed Sarah D. Clark as age 10, which is roughly consistent with a September 1880 birth date.
- rscoots 5y ago
  Yea, looks like that source came out Dec 2019 which is after I first looked into this. Very interesting & well written write up! Even though Wikipedia says "Better source needed" for whatever reason. The author still casts a good amount of doubt on her claim though, and even assuming the existing evidence is correct she still couldve been 116 it says. But yea as long as you don't have birth certificates or baptism records I guess that would always be true.
astrange 5y ago
> Really made me realize that sometimes simple, trivial things that everyone takes as fact really cannot be trusted. One I've noticed is "Einstein was super smart" when a simpler theory is "Einstein didn't cite prior work so everyone thought he did it."
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  Einstein was a patent clerk. A patent office is basically a library of ideas. So he was paid to study ideas in detail day after day for years. Likely some of his ideas on relativity came from train scheduling patents frequently requested at the time since railroad companies were going pan-European. FYI: Elite VCs pay people to basically do what Einstein did: study new ideas and trends all day. There are a few US market intelligence companies like 451 Group that can write mind-blowing reports. (Their early Android predictions report delivered at one of the O'Reilly Conferences proved to be very accurate.)
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >One I've noticed is "Einstein was super smart" when a simpler theory is "Einstein didn't cite prior work so everyone thought he did it." What prior work? Most of the discussion about Einstein's theories not being original and not being credited seem to relate to his first wife, I thought.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

laurensr 5y ago

From the article, albeit a bit... buried: There is a petition to exhume the bodies and confirm the identity theft https://www.change.org/p/m-emmanuel-macron-p%C3%A9tition-en-faveur-de-l-exhumation-des-corps-de-jeanne-et-yvonne-calment-300e3b0c-4ab7-4bdf-b0bc-df40fc9c6487 https://www.change.org/p/m-emmanuel-macron-p%C3%A9tition-en-...

chrisbolt 5y ago
Has a change.org petition ever done... anything?
- lallysingh 5y ago
  It makes the petitioners feel like they've done something.
- stavros 5y ago
  My petition to stop petitions from achieving anything has been a wild success.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    Where do I sign?
    - stavros 5y ago
      http://chng.it/LFQSp5nc7r http://chng.it/LFQSp5nc7r
- eloisius 5y ago
  Signing a peittion earned me so spam one time that it helped motivate me to move my email from gmail.com to my own domain, so I'd say it's not useless.
  - lovemenot 5y ago
    I down-voted you, in the hope that it'll spur you on to even greater things.

Bayart 5y ago

A minor pet peeve of mine : I would like English-speaking writers to stop using the term « Victorian » for places that are not Britain or the British Empire. There was no Queen Victoria, no Victorian era, no Victorian spirit in France. Indeed it was a time of humiliation, political instability and rampant nationalism, albeit on a canvas of industry.

david-gpu 5y ago
It's a bit like asking people not to use the Gregorian calendar in places that are not predominantly Christian. We have to adapt our language to the person we are communicating with, and if they are familiar with the time frame associated with Queen Victoria, I can see how it makes sense to use it. We could refer to the period of Isabella II of Spain, but they wouldn't understand us, so it would be rather pointless.
- skissane 5y ago
  > It's a bit like asking people not to use the Gregorian calendar in places that are not predominantly Christian. I think it is different in that numbering years is useful, and we need to have an agreed starting point, and by historical accident we've all adopted an estimated (likely slightly incorrect) birth year for the founder of one of the world's major religions. It is hard to pick a culturally-neutral starting point – astronomers sometimes use the Julian period starting at 4713 BCE, but while that is more religiously neutral it still isn't culturally neutral. (It is based partially on astronomy, but also partly on the taxation cycle of the ancient Roman Empire, and that's still Western-centric.) By contrast, applying names to periods of time is far less useful and far less portable across cultures. The 1800s looked very different in different parts of the world, but it was the same 100 year span everywhere. And we only do this for a handful of historical periods anyway (most seem to be named after British monarchs – Victorian, Georgian, Edwardian, etc). Applying those period names to places outside the British Empire is a bit like applying Japanese era names to European history. The whole thing of historical era names seems to be somewhat dying anyway – references to decades (the 1990s, the 1920s, etc) seems more popular in discussing more recent history – the Elizabethan era was in the 16th and very early 17th century, not in the 20th and early 21st. > We have to adapt our language to the person we are communicating with, and if they are familiar with the time frame associated with Queen Victoria, I can see how it makes sense to use it. We could refer to the period of Isabella II of Spain, but they wouldn't understand us, so it would be rather pointless. "mid-to-late 19th century" covers roughly the same timeframe, and everyone knows what that is.

laurent123456 5y ago

If this theory is true I guess it means she died at around 100, which is still honourable. It would have been interesting if she had lived to 120 like a real supercentenarian, which means the fake age of 142. Then at least we would have been sure that something's off.

jobigoud 5y ago
> she had lived to 120 like a real supercentenarian The point is that no one ever lived to 120 in a provable way, so it's not something that could have happened to the daughter. Also in the swap hypothesis Yvonne made it to 99, not 100.

j_leboulanger 5y ago

I feel like the pictures shown on the article demonstrate the opposite of the author theory. When the author writes things like "undeniable", the resemblance is more questionable than undeniable when he tries to match the pictures of Yvonne with the ones of the 122 years old women. I was not convinced at all by the article. Moreover in such a rich family in France, changing identity like this would have been spotted really quickly.

alpaca128 5y ago
I agree that some of the photo comparisons were weird. The rest however was indeed very convincing to me. Mismatched eye color, height and appearance untypical of that age, and cognitive tests that estimated a much younger age? That's not something you can just discard imho, and those are the metrics you can hardly fake. > changing identity like this would have been spotted really quickly. Unless the people close to her didn't have an interest in spilling the beans.
- phpnode 5y ago
  If it was fraud, it was likely mail fraud, at least at first. That is to say, the people closest around her would not necessarily have known that she was claiming to be Jeanne - the family only had to have a death certificate issued in Yvonne's name, everything else could have continued as normal. And when she did finally have to publicly assume Jeanne's identity enough time had passed that few people would remember her mother.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    But still, there is proof that people in that time believed that Yvonne had been sick, and died. Would they have buried Jeanne under her daughter's name and no one noticed?
patall 5y ago
> Moreover in such a rich family in France, changing identity like this would have been spotted really quickly. She sold her apartment for a fixed per month amount. Sure, you need to have the apartment in the first place but that doesn't sound rich to me. Further, if my neighbor dies, I do not have any insights in the paperwork. So at that point, I only know that that nice older lady from upstairs died. If you then ask me 60 years later if that older lady was the mother or the daughter, I am not sure I would know. Besides, I would probably be proud of someone like her in my neighborhood, so I might be careful to refute her. Afterall, you get a lot of prestige from having the longest lived person in your country, city or neighborhood.

trishika 5y ago

https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/74/Supplement_1/S13/5569844 https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/74/Supple...

phpnode 5y ago
I didn't find this refutation especially convincing, and the way it is presented makes it seem ideologically motivated. The underlying argument in that article is that the people around Calment would have known that Yvonne is not Jeanne, and therefore they would have been caught. An alternative explanation is that the people around Calment knew nothing of her claiming to be Jeanne at all until much later on in her life. By which time the only people who knew about the fraudulent claim would be either very old themselves, or sympathetic to the situation an old and dear friend or family member has found themselves in. The only way to know for sure would be DNA testing.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  > An alternative explanation is that the people around Calment knew nothing of her claiming to be Jeanne at all until much later on in her life. By which time the only people who knew about the fraudulent claim would be either very old themselves, or sympathetic to the situation an old and dear friend or family member has found themselves in. This doesn't make sense - there is witness testimony and other records attesting that Yvonne, the daughter, died. Her husband sought leave from the military to be by her side.
thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
This is not convincing >It is not reasonable to claim that she could provide, for example, the names of JC’s godparents based upon her recollection of what she might have read many years previously in an attempt to maintain a fraud. Yes, it is. That's the best example?
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Here is a better quote[0] from Robine in Le Parisien: > On a eu accès à des informations qu'elle seule pouvait connaître, comme le nom de ses professeurs de mathématiques ou de bonnes passées par l'immeuble. On lui a posé des questions sur ces sujets. Soit elle ne se souvenait plus, soit elle a répondu juste. Sa fille n'aurait pas pu savoir ça. "We have had access to information that only she [Jeanne] could have known, such as the name of her math teachers or of nannys who passed through the building. We have asked her questions on such subjects. She either didn't remember them, or she answered correctly. Her daughter [Yvonne] wouldn't have had how to know these things." Things like math teachers' names and nannys seem much more convincing to me. It's not impossible to know them, but I can tell you for sure I don't know such things about my mother, and I am about the age Yvonne was when she died (or when her mother would have died if we believe this theory). [0] https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/jeanne-calment-une-imposture-le-scientifique-qui-a-valide-son-record-s-insurge-30-12-2018-7978578.php https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/jeanne-calment-une-impostu...

lacker 5y ago

I am convinced that Jeanne Calment was actually two people. She is a fairly strange outlier in the record of the oldest people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe... The oldest person on record is Jeanne at 122, then one 119, then one 118, then the next seven are at 117, then the next thirteen are at 116. She's just an extreme outlier from the rest of the distribution. Also, in the 25 years since Calment, the distribution of subsequent extremely old people has seemed unchanged. Nobody has gotten any closer to Calment, although we've had far more people in the 114-117 range. It all points to a faked data point.

kzrdude 5y ago
How can we be sure it's not a natural outlier?
- fungiblecog 5y ago
  From the evidence presented in this article
  - beaner 5y ago
    It's evidence, not certainty.
  - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    But there is no evidence in the article, only speculation and poorly done Bayesian statistics.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
When this hypothesis first came out, I remember looking into it a lot, specifically looking into the rebuttals from Western European researchers that poo-poo'ed the Russians' theories. I remember the thing that struck me was how defensive without evidence the rebuttals sounded to me. I mean, the rebuttals kept pointing out how there was all this documentary evidence to show that Jeanne Calment was 122, but of course all of that documentary evidence would still exist if it were actually evidence from her mother. I never found any convincing rebuttals of (a) the sheer outlier-ness of Jeanne's age, nor any of the more suspicious actions like some of the burned documents from her family. FWIW I think the jury is definitely still out, but I would take the "Jeanne was 2 people" bet 9 ways to Sunday if it could be proven with DNA evidence.

alain94040 5y ago

Debunked, see study mentioned in https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49746060 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49746060

thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
I've read it, it's linked above. I am not convinced.

arnaudsm 5y ago

Fake supercentenarians have been used by multiple governments in the past to glorify their lifestyle. USSR did the same, claiming that Shirali Muslimov reached 168. China also has fake "longevity villages" that draw some tourism.

nerdponx 5y ago
Interestingly, this is specifically posited in the section about insurance fraud. It seems like incentives to protect the scam from discovery kept expanding the longer the scam went on.

kevinpet 5y ago

I read up on this when the article first came out, and what really stood out was the way the supports of Calment's claim / debunkers of the new theory would ignore how their supposed evidence did or did not fit in. IIRC, the Guinness authenticator talked a lot about how they authenticated the birth records and other types of records, which is irrelevant to this particular claim.

thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
Having briefly looked it up now, I agree. For gerontologists, I can imagine a strong social pressure not to break kayfabe about the jewel of the field. If I'm generous and assume the field is as rigourous as medicine or history, I have to compare it to how frequently those fields have been mistaken. I put zero stock into Guinness World Records. I'm not convinced by the evidence in the link because it's hard to make judgements about so long in the past. But that's exactly why suspicion should be the default stance, with such financial incentives to inflate one's age. For me, claiming that people would have spotted the switch or attacking the qualifications of the authors isn't enough.

fieryskiff11 5y ago

Evidence That Jeanne Calment Died in 1934—Not 1997 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6424156/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6424156/

adolph 5y ago

For a moment I thought the claim was Calment was a chimera as well as a long-lived person. A chimera is essentially a single organism that's made up of cells from two or more "individuals"—that is, it contains two sets of DNA, with the code to make two separate organisms. One way that chimeras can happen naturally in humans is that a fetus can absorb its twin. This can occur with fraternal twins, if one embryo dies very early in pregnancy, and some of its cells are "absorbed" by the other twin. The remaining fetus will have two sets of cells, its own original set, plus the one from its twin. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/3-human-chimeras-that-already-exist/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/3-human-chimeras-... Unfortunately the claim is more like identity theft. Much less interesting biologically. This article outlines four types of known human chimeras: https://www.healthline.com/health/chimerism https://www.healthline.com/health/chimerism

layoutIfNeeded 5y ago

“In 1942, Jeanne’s husband (Yvonne’s father) died from cherry poisoning” Wait, what? Cherry poisoning??

ectopod 5y ago
Apricot kernels, bitter almonds and cherry stones all contain amygdalin, which releases cyanide if you eat it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry#Health_risks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry#Health_risks
- layoutIfNeeded 5y ago
  Strangely, I remember eating tons of dried apricot kernels as a kid with no ill effects. We were eating them like almonds…
  - sitharus 5y ago
    That’s because the human body can metabolise a small quantity of cyanide. Going by Wikipedia sweet apricot kernels produce ~0.3mg of cyanide when eaten, but the toxic threshold is around 100mg for acute effects. Still, chronic cyanide exposure isn’t good for you.
hughdbrown 5y ago
Cherries and apples have seeds with traces of a cyanide derivative that can be converted in the stomach. > Cherries have a small, hardened pit that surrounds their seed, also called a kernel. The kernels of cherry pits and other stone fruits contain the chemical amygdalin. Amygdalin is a cyanogenic glycoside — a chemical that your body converts into the toxic compound hydrogen cyanide. In Ozark episode S2E19, Darlene poisons her husband Jacob's coffee with ground cherry pits, for a current cultural reference.
- mc32 5y ago
  You have to eat quite a few to experience ill effects. One or two are not going to kill you. A couple of dozen will. I've cracked and eaten a cherry pit. It was strangely tasty.

Mvandenbergh 5y ago

I recently read the New Yorker article on this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-calment-the-oldest-person-who-ever-lived-or-a-fraud https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-cal... which is very long and very worth reading and which I think gives both the "yes" and "no" sides a fair shake. Some key takeaways (my interpretation anyway): -Yes, she looked startlingly young for someone her age in many pictures -The extremity of how old she got is really surprising, considering that we can make distributional assumptions about age and that the existence of Jeanne Calment would imply that we should see quite a few other people at ages slightly less than hers and the next oldest is three years younger. These are both surprising but not really independently so - it can hardly be surprising that someone who lives to an astounding age might look younger than they would be expected to. Most of the other evidence, in particular her occasional slips mixing up father and husband have no real evidentiary value. Confusing relatives with each other is something that people with incipient memory failure do literally all the time. However, I also think that the "two people" / "daughter swap" hypothesis, doesn't stand up to inspection very well. Specifically, the problem with it is that there is quite a lot of recorded testimony and recollections from people who absolutely would have known both of them, had no reason to lie, and were quite clear that they were different people. Specifically in that article:- Claudine Serena (or more particularly her mother and grandfather) Freddy who was seven when his mother Yvonne died - can a seven year old keep up the pretence that his mother is his grandmother successfully? Gilberte Mery who recalls the tradition of the promenades and the degree to which Arlesian bourgeois were constantly watching each other The notary who administered Jeanne's and Yvonne's marriage contracts and then later carried out real estate transactions for Jeanne Yvonne's husband requested leave from the army on the grounds of his wife's serious illness (and we have records of that) Yvonne had a substantial public funeral, which would have involved viewing of the corpse by the very large number of prominent local people who knew her I went into that article thinking that this would certainly be fake but came out thinking that faking this would have been completely impossible. There were just way too many people, many with no interest in perpetuating a lie, who would have had to go along with this - long before any possible motive about the world's oldest woman. As to motive, apparently actual inheritance taxes would have been not the 34% in the OP but a mere 6% - an easy mistake to make if you don't have access to century old French inheritance tax law but a pretty important difference. Incidentally, the role of Aubrey de Grey is very amusing in that article - it is pretty clear that he doesn't actually take the impostor theory too seriously but is using it as a tool in order to get his hands on the DNA sample which obviously makes sense given his interests. To quote from the article: Either she had lived longer than any human being ever or she had executed an audacious fraud. As one observer wrote, “Both are highly unlikely life stories but one is true.”

hattmall 5y ago

Kind of wild then that the bible says man will not live more than 120 years. Makes me wonder how many ancient people approached that age.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Meh, good thing she was a woman then.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  Aren't there two kinds of man, the wer and the wyf?
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    So Proto-Europeans had same-sex marriage? (Alas no mention of nonbynari-man)
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
Probably just a local aphorism stemming from a sexagesimal culture. 60 year olds exist, so 2x 60 is the limit.
Spooky23 5y ago
Life expectancy is weird… even with low life expectancy of the 1700s, if you made it to 65, youd likely hit 75.

ahurmazda 5y ago

I know its impossible but I still like to imagine that amongst the billions of people born over millennia, maybe one or two were age-mutants. They lived for hundreds of years. Did not see the point in convincing others of their age (may even thought it might be dangerous). Grew tired. Bored. And died eventually.

nuclearwast 5y ago
This is the plot of the movie "The Man from Earth" It's well rated, I would say it's worth at least a watch.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  And when you watch it do not expect an action movie, it is more of a brain tease asking the 'What if?' question in a pretty effective way. I liked it a lot, but most of the people that I recommended it to did not and found it boring.
perl4ever 5y ago
When I trip slightly, step on something and hurt my toe, that sort of thing, it makes me think that even if I somehow wasn't to age or get a fatal illness, that given long enough, it's statistically certain I will fall down the stairs and die or something like that. Probability produces mortality completely independent of human physiology. If your risk of death flattens out, but is not zero, then your expected lifespan is very finite. I think some people have claimed that exceptionally long lived people do end up with a constant (albeit high) risk of death per year rather than an increasing one. It's a little bit sad to think that nothing remotely human could possibly see what the world will be like in a million years, let alone a billion. We could all be 20 years old permanently, and we'd still only live a few thousand years.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_of_St._Germain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_of_St._Germain https://pelicanstateofmind.com/louisiana-love/jacques-st-germain-louisiana-vampire/ https://pelicanstateofmind.com/louisiana-love/jacques-st-ger... This story fascinates me. I recently went to New Orleans and happened to walk by Jacques’ house; I saw the current owner snoozing in an armchair with a book. Later I went down the rabbit hole of the Count’s life and how he seems to be the progenitor of so many things and legends in modern society.

dredmorbius 5y ago

See: "Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans" In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. In Italy, which has more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by low per capita incomes and a short life expectancy. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625547 (6 August 2019, 227 comments)

VintageCool 5y ago
A number of people in the linked thread point out that Sardinia has a very low crime rate. However, the relevant metric is crime rate decades ago -- Yvonne Calment is imputed to have committed this fraud starting in 1934. 70 years ago, Sardinia had a reputation for banditry, sheep rustling (which turned to kidnapping), vendettas, and resistance to the State. The island does fit the pattern, despite having mellowed out to an extremely low crime rate today.
- 11235813213455 5y ago
  yea, similar to their northern neighbor of Corsica, they can be a little bit more nationalist and defensive, understandable for islanders, and overall very pacifists
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  > Yvonne Calment is imputed to have committed this fraud starting in 1934. But France as one of the global powers has a very low crime rate in the 30s and the Calments are notable from their region not random unknown. If you think about it, the whole thing doesn't make much sense. Yvonne Calment should somehow have decided to replace her mother for sixty years including twenty while her husband was still alive for unclear reasons (a far fetched motive involving taxes was only found after Zay started pushing his theory) successfuly fooling the French state. The whole thing doesn't make any sense. I don't understand how Zay was published (I mean, I do, it took him a decade to find a bad enough journal but it's sad) and I don't know why serious people are wasting their time arguing with him. At this point, I just wish the genetic analysis were done to close the whole thing.

jasode 5y ago

The excerpt from wikipedia with paragraphs refuting this thread's blog post's theory is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Skepticism_regarding_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Skepticism_rega... >[...], the theory had attracted widespread media attention since 30 December 2018 after a series of postings on Medium titled "J'Accuse!" by gerontology blogger Yuri Deigin went viral.[27][28][29] This theory, however, is considered weak by mainstream longevity experts, such as French gerontologist Jean-Marie Robine.[30] >Robine, a French gerontologist and one of two validators of Calment, dismissed the claims and pointed out that during his research Calment had correctly answered questions about things that her daughter could not have known first hand.[31][32] Robine also dismissed the idea that the residents of Arles could have been duped by the switch.[32][33] Michel Allard, the second doctor who helped verify Calment's records, said that the team had considered the identity switch theory while Jeanne was still alive because she looked younger than her daughter in photographs, but similar discrepancies in the rates of aging are commonly found in families with centenarian members.[8] Allard and Robine also pointed out the existence of numerous documents relating to Calment's activities throughout her life, and that the Russians brought no evidence forward to support their hypothesis.[8] >After a meeting of the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris on 23 January 2019, French, Swiss, and Belgian longevity experts concluded that none of the Russian claimants provided any proof of an identity substitution, [...]

thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
>Calment had correctly answered questions about things that her daughter could not have known first hand. Does anybody know the primary source for this? What did she know?
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  I'm pretty skeptical of this line of reasoning. How is there any knowledge a mother couldn't have told her daughter?
  - spoonjim 5y ago

chestertn 5y ago

That would be very cool. There is this passage in Genesis [1]: "And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years." If you read the list of verified oldest people [2], the only person surpassing 120 is her. I wonder if in ancient times they had some statistics and they found out there is some sort of hard limit to human lifespan. [1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%206%3A3&version=KJV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%206%3A3... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...

camkego 5y ago

"Given that after age 100 the annual probability of dying is about 1/2, the chances of a centenarian living to 122 are incredibly small." Small rant about this statement. The annual probability of dying is not determined by a fair coin flip. (at over 100 years) It is determined by the physical world. That number, .5 chance of dying is the result of a model to predict the chance that someone over 100 will die. So, to say that "the chances of a centenarian living to 122 are incredibly small.", is to say, the chances of living beyond one hundred are determined by a model's output, and not the physical world. You certainly could say that based on empirical evidence, people hitting over 120 is very unlikely.

munchler 5y ago
The model doesn't even support their conclusion. It's true that the chances of any particular centenarian living that long are "incredibly small", but the picture changes when we think about them as a group: * Chances of any given 100 year-old dying before age 122 (according to this model): 1 - 1/(2 ^ 22) = 1 - 1/4,194,304 = 99.999976%. * Number of centenarians currently alive: ~573,000 * Chances that all living centenarians will die before age 122: (1 - 1/4,194,304) ^ ~573,000 = ~87%. (I've hand-waved a bit here, but it's close enough.) So, according to this model, there's roughly a 13% chance that at least one current centenarian will live to 122. I would actually say this model is too optimistic.
- Someone 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz–Makeham_law_of_mortality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz–Makeham_law_of_mortal...: “The Gompertz–Makeham law states that the human death rate is the sum of an age-dependent component (the Gompertz function, named after Benjamin Gompertz), which increases exponentially with age[2] and an age-independent component (the Makeham term, named after William Makeham)” I think it’s possible they badly described this model. Now, that’s an empirical law. There’s evidence that it overestimates probability of dying for centenarians. A recent article (https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol44/52/default.htm https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol44/52/defaul...) uses a different model, compares it with actuarial data, and concludes: “Based on the Bayesian analysis, there is a greater than 99% probability that the current MRAD of 122 will be broken by 2100. We estimate the probabilities that a person lives to at least age 126, 128, or 130 this century, as 89%, 44%, and 13%, respectively.”

anonu 5y ago

Nice little forensic analysis. I definitely enjoyed reading it. But... who cares?

boudin 5y ago

Note that after this article was published, a few more scientific articles confirmed her longevity record, as mentionned in her wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment

throwawayswede 5y ago

Considering how difficult it is to verify information +200 years old and how likely it is that theories based on some information would fall apart if one piece turns out to be a fake or a lie, I wonder how much we actually know about history, or more like, what's the amount of lies we believe and live by everyday thinking it's undeniable truth because a group of "experts" thought it is.

kzrdude 5y ago
Knowledge and the theory of it should not be based on absolute truths but on what we know, how we k ow it and the limits of that knowledge.

bloak 5y ago

I'd put my money on it being a fake. Maybe I'm cynical, but the refusal to provide DNA plus the deliberate destruction of photos seems fairly significant to me. Years ago huge amounts were written about a woman who claimed to be Anastasia of the Romanovs. Lots of discussion, lots of detailed evidence, but when I read the bit about how she refused to ever speak Russian I knew which way I'd bet on that one.