World's oldest human was a 122-year-old French smoker after all Russian claims that the world's oldest-ever human on record actually had her identity stolen by her daughter have been trashed by a paper published today in The Journals of Gerontology. Jeanne Calment was already a minor national treasure in her native France when she passed away in Arles in 1997 at the age of 122 and 165 days …
That, or they're trying to distract people from talking about life expectancy in Russia.
"When you Google the Russian researchers, you find nothing"
At least that can be easily debunked as false, fake news.
When I googled 'the Russian researchers', I certainly didn't get anything helpful (Creepypasta sleep experiment was in the first five). Although, apparently, the Russian dude maybe shouldn't be talking to foriegners...
It's the curse of the soundbite idiom: I supposed he wasn't intending to be taken literally by pedants. If he'd said "he has nothing between his ears" that would be untrue too. It's one academic dissing another for lacking a serious body of peer-reviewed published work. You can Google the two Russian researchers but practically everything you find about them concerns Jeanne Calment case and nothing else.
That said, I note that Zak uploaded to Research Gate a brief response to the new Calment paper.
According to Wikipedia, it's an American woman in second place. In fact, I can't see a single Russian anywhere on that page, except for one man who was born in the Russian Empire (in 1905), which became Poland in 1918, and eventually moved to Israel.
Thing is, people usually say they are younger that they really are, not older.
I knew a person that I thought was 85, when she died it turned out she was actually 91. Even family members had to search for her birth certificate to know how old she was when she died, since not even her own daughter knew how old she really was.
> A team of French, Danish and Swiss researchers, statisticians and scientists assembled to test each of the 17 Russian claims, and their findings unveiled today ruthlessly dismantle the lot.
Pffft. Their first mistake was to take them seriously. Come on. This is the country where they officially believe that Americans never landed on Moon, 9/11 was done by CIA, John F. Kennedy was assassinated by FBI, there are aliens in Area 51, NATO plans to occupy them and other such bull. Disparaging others to show how great Russia is is a government-sponsored national sport. Why debunk everything some loons claim? They can easily pull out some other insulting "theory" out of their ... well, the same place the previous came from.
Unfortunately, except -- possibly* -- for "...NATO plans to occupy them...", you've pretty much described the mass of National Enquirer-reading, InfoWars-following loonies occupying vast swaths of middle-America.
* For them, its not NATO but jackbooted, United Nations, One-Worlder thugs, all ready to invade and force gun control and universal healthcare on us.
> you've pretty much described the mass of National Enquirer-reading, InfoWars-following loonies occupying vast swaths of middle-America.
Mike, yes, crazies are everywhere. The difference is that conspiracy theories are not pushed as the officially approved POV. Trump? Ok, I stand corrected...
Personally, I'd like to know which country is full of rationalists determined to credit only hypotheses that are well-supported by evidence. Or even a country with a substantial portion of Bayesian reasoners.
Human beings are in general prone to believing unlikely things. That's the nature of the beast.
122 isn't quite unbelievable, but it's hard to believe.
Here's a simple chart of oldest living people:
http://www.grg.org/SC/SCChartsGraphs.html
Calment is an utter outlier, and yes, outliers happen, but the mortality cliff at these ages is massive. Like, she's literally off the charts by a fair ways compared to any other supercenetarian. How unlikely? Well, one published stat is that of people who live to 100, only one in 1000 lives to 110. Solve for 122, and Calment becomes...unexpected.
The second reason to doubt the Calment record is that many other supercenetarian records have been wrong, and supercenetarian claims may be clustered around...regions with bad birth records, and regions with relatively poor life expectancy and relatively high crime rates (greetings, Okinawa!).
Is this the crime of the century? No. But if you're studying supercenetarians and trying to figure out what Calment means as a data point, "not real" is the parsimonious explanation.
A woman is as old as she feels.
Judging by her photos, she must have felt older than god.
However, a man is as old as the woman he feels.
Which also explains all the godly trysts with young virgins on earth, resulting in various "son's of god" through the ages, as duly documented in the Iliad and other more recent holy books.
I can't believe she was on a voluntary health kick at 117. I bet she didn't take up jogging or Pilates. More probably all her descendants had died and the care home just mandated it for their own safety.
If a smoker gets to a century then you should just let them smoke, maybe employee a nurse to hold their cigarettes for them.
If you drop them they just go out. Makes smoking them like smoking a wet 1980s cigarette though. Plus adds fire retardants to the environment and your gut biome.
I realise cigarettes are dangerous but I'm even less of a fan of flame retardants - at least give us a choice.
I would give my left lung for one of the increasingly retrospectively 'Old Player Specials' fags than anything I've payed ten times the tax for recently.
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