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There's probably nothing malicious about most cases of missing or strangely uniform birth dates. In many parts of the world over a century ago, people simply di
by kijin 4y ago
There's probably nothing malicious about most cases of missing or strangely uniform birth dates. In many parts of the world over a century ago, people simply didn't bother with accurate records.
For example, both my grandpa and grandma had two birthdays each, in two different calendar systems, that pointed to wildly different points in time. Nobody remembered exactly when they were born. My other grandma was recorded as being four years older than she thought she actually was, and nobody knows the truth, either. My father's birth was filed with the authorities several years late, though the document itself pointed to the correct date. My family's not from some sort of jungle, either. All of this happened in a highly bureaucratized, highly literate society.
Go back a few more decades and one could easily imagine "She was born in the spring, in the year of the great flood" becoming "Let's just say she was born on April 1, and when was the flood? I mean the second one after Steve became king" when modern record-keepers demand a specific date. We're trying to see more precision in the data than anyone ever intended to record. No wonder we find artifacts.
- VintageCool 4y agoMalicious no, suspicious yes. There likely were parts of the world a century ago without accurate records. It also appears that supercentenarians are concentrated in places that didn't keep accurate birth records around the time they were born. There have been people who attempted to adopt the diets of the "blue zones" where many supercentenarians have lived, but maybe in our search for long life we should have been adopting regional poverty, low incomes, and dodgy record-keeping!
- ip26 4y agoIt is perfectly possible to be correlated. People almost universally eat more meat as they gain wealth. So if a diet of mostly plants really was the way to go, you aren’t going to find it in upper Manhattan.
- kijin 4y agoWe need to look for patterns in the birth records of people born around the same time in the same area, but who died at a "normal" age. If the same patterns occur in both cases, it's just lossy record-keeping. If not, there might be something dodgy about the supercentenarians in particular. Without a proper control group, it's all speculation.