Started by Milan Popović (@milan_p) ·
how do we know the oldest people were really that old?
Calment's 122 years is the record. In 2018 two Russian researchers argued her daughter had taken over her identity decades earlier. Most gerontologists who examined the evidence disagree, but it sent me into how ages get validated at all.
6 sources · 49 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- “jeanne calment identity theory”
- Ended at
- Blue zone
The Trail
- “jeanne calment identity theory” (google.com)
- Jeanne Calment (en.wikipedia.org)
- Supercentenarian (en.wikipedia.org)
- Gerontology Research Group (en.wikipedia.org)
- Longevity myths (en.wikipedia.org)
- Blue zone (en.wikipedia.org)
the famous longevity hotspots get criticized for leaning on shaky birth records
What I came away with
Extreme ages are checked against documents: birth and baptism records, censuses, marriages. Where records are poor, claimed ages drift upward. The 2024 Ig Nobel for demography went to work arguing that many famous long-lived regions are partly an artifact of bad record-keeping.
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