I am reminded of https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/study-questions-ag... which lays out the case that the oldest woman on record, Jeanne Calment, was actually her daughter Yvonne who substituted herself for her mother in 1934 to avoid inheritance taxes.
Yes, there's an interesting philosophical question here about burdens of proof and Humean 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'. Calment's claim is to be the oldest person out of billions of people, and she is the oldest by a truly extraordinary margin - no one has even come close to reaching her record before or since. So, which is more likely: that her claim however improbable (someone has to win the lottery) is completely correct (and she simply had some unique luck or mutation enabling her excess longevity), or that some highly unusual (but still more likely than '1 in tens of billions') circumstance (such as a complicated tax & insurance fraud) has led to a mistake? Indeed, how would one ever be sure of such a claim, short of the isotopic testing advocated in OP - which will, incidentally, stop working in the future?
I just discovered this theory and I've been reading the sources, both in English and in French and frankly I'm not convinced. I don't find the photographic evidence presented in the paper particularly convincing. It really reads that the type of stuff you read on conspiracy theory forums, extrapolating wildly based on cherry-picked and very limited material. Besides I think the counter-argument that the people in Arles would've noticed if Fernand Calment suddenly started pretending that his daughter was his wife seems rather pertinent.
I think the best argument in favor of this theory is that apparently Jeanne asked for some family documents to be destroyed which does seem highly suspicious, although it's also quite plausible that there were some other family secrets she didn't want to be made public especially since at the time she was becoming famous worldwide.
Meanwhile Jeanne was apparently able to name old professors and maids of hers, things that her daughter would probably not have known or remembered.
I wouldn't rule the theory out entirely but it's rather flimsy at this point IMO.
A few years ago, the government of Japan decided to have people visit everyone over the age of 100, to see how they were getting along and what they were doing right.[1] They found 231 cases where pensions were being paid out but the person could not be found.
Thanks for finding that link! I saw this on the news at the time and I've never been able to find something in English to talk about it. One of things that shook out from this is that they redid the longevity studies in Okinawa and discovered that people in Okinawa have the same life expectancy as everyone else in Japan (which is not much different than the rest of the world). All of those nutrition studies in the 70's were based on government census data -- which turned out to be massive pension fraud.
There is also the reverse process: people who are older than officially recorded. When my in-laws came to the USA from Vietnam after the war they wanted to be able to work for a long time before anyone forced the to retire, so they just said they were 25 years old, an understatement of quite a number of years. Upheaval and displacement tend to wipe out government records.
We found this out about my grandma near the end of her life. Everyone had always thought she'd been born in 1927. Turns out, according to some paperwork we'd gotten from her home country she'd actually been born in 1923. It was all because she wanted to lie to my grandpa and seem younger than she was. At some point she just forgot about it.
I kinda wondered that looking at the paper. It's hard to know from eyeballing such low numbers relatively speaking, but it seems like there's not only a large peak in supercentenarians born shortly before the introduction of records (suggesting erroneously reported very old age), but maybe also a smaller peak after the records.
With name databases, there seems to have been a phenomenon where people retroactively created records when they were introduced (e.g., people registered for SSNs after the fact). Maybe there's something similar going on: people are overreporting their age when born with no records, but also are overreporting their age when they registered their birth after the fact.
It's a bit hard to explain in terms of underreporting age, and the trends are such that I think they still largely support the authors' hypotheses in terms of relative overreporting and underreporting. But I agree there's probably more fuzziness here.
The bigger issue for me that this raises are the perils of making inferences on outliers of any distribution. The further out you go on any characteristic, the more likely you are going to run into similar problems with errors, fraud, or unusual circumstances.
> When my in-laws came to the USA from Vietnam after the war they wanted to be able to work for a long time before anyone forced the to retire, so they just said they were 25 years old
God bless your parents. I don’t care much for the immigration debate in our country, but we should be actively recruiting people like this.
I didn't know this was a trend! I also have several vietnamese relatives who faked their age except their logic was to use an older age so they can claim social security benefits earlier.
They usually don't even use the same month and day for their fake DOB. This is because everyone in the family only celebrate their chinese/lunar calendar birthday instead (which is already on a different western date each year).
There's been recent controversy in Europe over refugees from Syria etc because they can't prove their age, and under-18s get better treatment for the obvious reason, so then governments want to use questionably-accurate methods like examining teeth…
This is a persistent story in professional football (soccer). Clubs have taken to measuring wrist bones and other techniques to avoid buying players who are older than they say. A problem for people from countries where the official documentation process is somehow lacking.
In the UK I know there have been a few instances of people claiming to be minors, so they're less likely to be deported. I assume that 'age' would persist if they got leave to stay.
The legendary Delta blues musician Son House is usually regarded to have been born in 1902, but comments he made about his own age would imply that he was born around 1886.
It has been suggested that he lied about his age when he moved up north in order to avoid being discriminated against when applying for jobs. Or he may have been born in 1902 and simply lying about, or genuinely mistaken about, his age.
during the Hurricane Katrina displacements in 2005, public schools and Universities around the nation struggled with the lack of grade records, identities and birth certificates due to prevalence of Louisiana's (backwards, non-existent, inaccessible) wiped out systems
I wouldn't say much has changed in some regions of the US
> Thousands of Japanese centenarians may have died decades ago
> The justice ministry said the survey found that more than 77,000 people listed as still alive in local government records would have to be aged at least 120, and 884 would be 150 or older.
> The nationwide survey was launched in August after police discovered the mummified corpse of Sogen Kato, who at 111 was listed as Tokyo's oldest man, in his family home 32 years after his death.
> Kato's granddaughter has been arrested on suspicion of abandoning his body and receiving millions of yen in pension payments after his unreported death.
> Soon after came the discovery that a 113-year-old woman listed as Tokyo's oldest resident had not been seen by her family for more than 20 years. Welfare officials have yet to locate Fusa Furuya, who was last seen in about 1986.
Note that the introduction of birth certificates in the US only reduced supercentarians, it didn’t eliminate them.
I would be willing to accept that most are frauds, but I do think it is possible for someone to live to be a supercentarian. I have met a couple people who are around 100 who seemed healthy and had it all together mentally. I’m sure some decent percent of people in that position have the ability to live for another 10 years
Of course, but that isn't what this study is about or why it (and other's like it) are important.
Researchers have spent tons of time trying to discover why certain areas are ripe with supercentenarians - what is it about their diet or environment or genetics or social structure. As a random person in the US, I have particularly heard about Okinawa in this regard.
This study is strongly implying that the only thing special about those areas is their ability and desire to commit fraud.
My great-grandmother died a month before her 100th birthday. Born in California with valid records and survived her husband by decades. She was pretty active and alert considering her age well into her 90s. We would walk together on the grounds of her retirement home (she needed a walker) until the last year or so.
Absolutely. My grandmother lived to 104. She had my mother when she was 45 and was still doing push-ups to stay in shape in her 80s. At her 100th birthday party, she blew out 100 candles in one breath. It's not hard to believe that at least a few people out of a billion could go well past that.
When the grandmother of, let’s say a friend, passed away at 96, I was surprised to note the local newspaper mention her age as 106, no doubt due to the political influence of said friend’s relatives. I didn’t realise at the time that this is a sort of thing people like to brag about.
You don't think it was simply an arithmetic mistake by the editor of the local deaths column? Given a birth date of 19xx and a death date of 20xx, an off-by-10 error doesn't sound too far-fetched.
I guess i'm gonna start planning moving to a no-birth-certificate region. Hoping the somewhat late move will still have a positive effect on my life- and healthspan.
I've wondered about this for a long time. Finally somebody investigated, and lo and behold, a good chunk of this phenomenon is simply the result of lying.
Odd, since a birth certificate is not actually a valid proof of identity.
There is no biometric associated with a birth certificate created in year X that can be used to prove that the baby named in it has grown up to become the person claiming that identity in year Y.
An actual background check has to establish a chain of evidence linking the birth to the person being checked. This requires interviewing relatives, friends and acquaintances, collecting school and business records, drivers license records and any other public or private records.
While I've also congettured in the past that at least a good chunk of extreme supercentenarians are due to anagraphical errors if not outright fraud, I do not think that the paper support the thesis well.
For starter they do not have a global model, it seems that they handpicked different statistics for different areas that support their thesis (they do not even show anything concrete for Japan).
Regarding Sardinia, their numbers seem actually wrong: looking at the raw Istat data the numbers for 55 year life expectancy for the Sardinian provinces seem in line with the rest of Italy (95-96%) putting Sardinia somewhere in the middle of the (quite tight) Italian distribution.
It is possible that the researcher averaged the data over a longer period of time that I bothered to look is possible, but the paper doesn't discuss the methodology.
Their fitting, p value not withstanding, also seem a bit adventurous; the fact that all and almost only Sardinian provinces are extrme outliers shoud have been a tell. The rest of the Italian bprovinces are in a tight uniform cluster.
Sardinia, except for a very brief period in the mid 2010s,has only 4 provinces, so it is possible that messed up their data extraction (they show 8 provinces).
Also Sardinia is not particularly poorer than the rest of Southern Italy and actually has a lower crime rate (which they suggest but not outright state is a factor).
A better paper would probably try to build a single model for Japan, Italy and US using actual mortality, crime and poverty rates.
It explicitly mentions pension fraud -- who wouldn't want to retire a little earlier?
> The hypothesis that these relatively low literacy rates and incomes are generating age-reporting errors and pension fraud, and therefore remarkable age
records, seems overlooked. ...
> This issue presents a substantial problem for remarkable-age databases, embodied in a
deliberately provocative, if seemingly absurd, hypothesis:
> Every ‘supercentenarian’ is an accidental or intentional identity thief, who owns real and
validated 110+ year-old documents, and is passably good at their job.
A little bit? It does say that many _could_ be committing, e.g., pension fraud, but that the primary issue is with the data, and the reliance on documents as the "source of truth" of these claims, and this seems to accurately sum it up:
> This issue presents a substantial problem for remarkable-age databases, embodied in a deliberately provocative, if seemingly absurd, hypothesis: "Every ‘supercentenarian’ is an accidental or intentional identity thief, who owns real and validated 110+ year-old documents, and is passably good at their job."
> This hypothesis cannot be invalidated by the further scrutiny of documents, or by models calibrated using document-informed ages. Rather, invalidating this hypothesis requires a fundamental shift: it requires the measurement of biological ages from fundamental physical properties, such as amino acid chirality or isotopic decay.
> Until such document-independent validation of remarkable ages occurs, the type I error rate of remarkable human age samples will remain unknown, and the validity of ‘supercentenarian’ data in question.
Man, I must be old--the first thing to come to mind was the Dannon yogurt ads from the 1970s with the old people of Soviet Georgia. And, at the time, Dannon actually caught some flack because there was no documentation of how old these people really were.
Do not condemn those people as liars or frauds. They did what any sensible person would have done, avoided death by conscription during the Great War by assuming the identities of their older cousins, brothers, uncles and fathers.
Dealing with my somewhat prematurely elderly father of 73 and his issues (my gps all lived relatively heartily into their 80 and 90s) I have to conclude my options in a few decades will be self-limited to driving my car off a cliff if I can't upload myself into a robot husk.
What I'm saying is that supercentenarianism seems heavily overrated.
If you are in bad shape at 73, you are probably not going to make it to 100. This is called 'compression of morbidity'. As people age better, the period of disability & lower quality of life shrinks, so you tend to live longer in good health but then once something goes wrong, you'll be dead quickly. A lot of centenarians are pretty active, even driving cars, until months or weeks before they die (and they may simply die in their sleep unexpectedly). It's the people who are in bad health in their 50s or 60s who can look forward to decades of expensive & painful ill health before they finally die... In any case, most centenarians I've seen interviewed seem happy to be alive, and don't wish for the sweet mercy of oblivion, so I am happy to take them at their word that they find their life worth living.
The oldest of the old don't have a quality of life that makes me (and many others) enthused about advanced age: cognitive-impairment, blindness, deafness, immobility, frailty, chronic disease-- all of these are "on the table" as normal expectations except for a few very rare exceptions.
Not to mention that at such advanced age, whether it's 95 or 105, people often need constant 24/7 care, usually from dedicated family members who sacrifice their time to extend the time of another.
I think it is a gamble. My grandmother was in a very good shape till around 100, she lived till 106 but she was sleeping most of the time (at least 16 hours a day) and the last time she took a walk in the yard was at around 104.
The point? She had a very good life up to at least 90 years old, much more than most people I know personally. Reaching 100 is not the point, living 95 good years is.
> 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
So I think for lack of birth certificates I can imagine the underlying process of unregistered people not being aware about their true age.
The claim that high poverty and crime rates produce such fraud feels prejudiced. also why would Sardinia be different in that regard compared to Sicily or poor regions on the Italian mainland?
Also I would be interested in how many hypothesis these researches tested on the data set and on whether they performed proper adjustments of thresholds (bonferroni correction)
> 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.
Interesting enough, the article doesn't mention that in a lot of places (and possibly a bit too long ago for any of those to be affected), baptismal certificates substituted for birth certificates
Sure, there might have been some time difference between date of birth from date of baptism, but it was usually short enough (even if it might have been a couple of years)
Another explanation could be that all the young people have moved away from the poorest areas and older people stayed and kept getting older. It depends if they are dividing supercentenarian population by today's population or by the area's population when they were born.
[+] [-] btilly|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwern|6 years ago|reply
(This is a general problem of priors and evidence and model uncertainty I think about occasionally: https://www.gwern.net/Modus https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood https://www.gwern.net/Mail-delivery#on-model-uncertainty https://www.gwern.net/Research-criticism https://www.gwern.net/Everything https://www.gwern.net/Turing-complete#on-seeing-through-and-... )
[+] [-] simias|6 years ago|reply
Apparently the theory gained traction thanks to this article summarizing the research: https://medium.com/@yurideigin/jaccuse-why-122-year-longevit... There are so many leaps of logic in there that it's hard for me to take seriously. I like in particular that they use this photo to argue that Yvonne was taller than Jeanne when their posture is completely different: https://miro.medium.com/max/1050/1*VBI9NRmZ58XcZXif_6cgzw.pn...
I think the best argument in favor of this theory is that apparently Jeanne asked for some family documents to be destroyed which does seem highly suspicious, although it's also quite plausible that there were some other family secrets she didn't want to be made public especially since at the time she was becoming famous worldwide.
Meanwhile Jeanne was apparently able to name old professors and maids of hers, things that her daughter would probably not have known or remembered.
I wouldn't rule the theory out entirely but it's rather flimsy at this point IMO.
[+] [-] Animats|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/world/asia/15japan.html
[+] [-] mikekchar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mktmkr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grawprog|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] o09rdk|6 years ago|reply
With name databases, there seems to have been a phenomenon where people retroactively created records when they were introduced (e.g., people registered for SSNs after the fact). Maybe there's something similar going on: people are overreporting their age when born with no records, but also are overreporting their age when they registered their birth after the fact.
It's a bit hard to explain in terms of underreporting age, and the trends are such that I think they still largely support the authors' hypotheses in terms of relative overreporting and underreporting. But I agree there's probably more fuzziness here.
The bigger issue for me that this raises are the perils of making inferences on outliers of any distribution. The further out you go on any characteristic, the more likely you are going to run into similar problems with errors, fraud, or unusual circumstances.
[+] [-] dev_dull|6 years ago|reply
God bless your parents. I don’t care much for the immigration debate in our country, but we should be actively recruiting people like this.
[+] [-] zawerf|6 years ago|reply
They usually don't even use the same month and day for their fake DOB. This is because everyone in the family only celebrate their chinese/lunar calendar birthday instead (which is already on a different western date each year).
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|6 years ago|reply
This is a persistent story in professional football (soccer). Clubs have taken to measuring wrist bones and other techniques to avoid buying players who are older than they say. A problem for people from countries where the official documentation process is somehow lacking.
[+] [-] benj111|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thefringthing|6 years ago|reply
It has been suggested that he lied about his age when he moved up north in order to avoid being discriminated against when applying for jobs. Or he may have been born in 1902 and simply lying about, or genuinely mistaken about, his age.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rolltiide|6 years ago|reply
I wouldn't say much has changed in some regions of the US
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chewz|6 years ago|reply
> The justice ministry said the survey found that more than 77,000 people listed as still alive in local government records would have to be aged at least 120, and 884 would be 150 or older.
> The nationwide survey was launched in August after police discovered the mummified corpse of Sogen Kato, who at 111 was listed as Tokyo's oldest man, in his family home 32 years after his death.
> Kato's granddaughter has been arrested on suspicion of abandoning his body and receiving millions of yen in pension payments after his unreported death.
> Soon after came the discovery that a 113-year-old woman listed as Tokyo's oldest resident had not been seen by her family for more than 20 years. Welfare officials have yet to locate Fusa Furuya, who was last seen in about 1986.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20627021
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|6 years ago|reply
Pretty standard, unanimous lifestyle advice. Stay social, stay active, not too much alcohol, lots of plants, avoid stress, don't smoke.
[+] [-] opportune|6 years ago|reply
I would be willing to accept that most are frauds, but I do think it is possible for someone to live to be a supercentarian. I have met a couple people who are around 100 who seemed healthy and had it all together mentally. I’m sure some decent percent of people in that position have the ability to live for another 10 years
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|6 years ago|reply
Researchers have spent tons of time trying to discover why certain areas are ripe with supercentenarians - what is it about their diet or environment or genetics or social structure. As a random person in the US, I have particularly heard about Okinawa in this regard.
This study is strongly implying that the only thing special about those areas is their ability and desire to commit fraud.
[+] [-] ajcodez|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] svachalek|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kranner|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfk13|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pieter_mj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Merrill|6 years ago|reply
There is no biometric associated with a birth certificate created in year X that can be used to prove that the baby named in it has grown up to become the person claiming that identity in year Y.
An actual background check has to establish a chain of evidence linking the birth to the person being checked. This requires interviewing relatives, friends and acquaintances, collecting school and business records, drivers license records and any other public or private records.
[+] [-] gpderetta|6 years ago|reply
For starter they do not have a global model, it seems that they handpicked different statistics for different areas that support their thesis (they do not even show anything concrete for Japan).
Regarding Sardinia, their numbers seem actually wrong: looking at the raw Istat data the numbers for 55 year life expectancy for the Sardinian provinces seem in line with the rest of Italy (95-96%) putting Sardinia somewhere in the middle of the (quite tight) Italian distribution.
It is possible that the researcher averaged the data over a longer period of time that I bothered to look is possible, but the paper doesn't discuss the methodology.
Their fitting, p value not withstanding, also seem a bit adventurous; the fact that all and almost only Sardinian provinces are extrme outliers shoud have been a tell. The rest of the Italian bprovinces are in a tight uniform cluster.
Sardinia, except for a very brief period in the mid 2010s,has only 4 provinces, so it is possible that messed up their data extraction (they show 8 provinces).
Also Sardinia is not particularly poorer than the rest of Southern Italy and actually has a lower crime rate (which they suggest but not outright state is a factor).
A better paper would probably try to build a single model for Japan, Italy and US using actual mortality, crime and poverty rates.
[+] [-] howard941|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|6 years ago|reply
> The hypothesis that these relatively low literacy rates and incomes are generating age-reporting errors and pension fraud, and therefore remarkable age records, seems overlooked. ...
> This issue presents a substantial problem for remarkable-age databases, embodied in a deliberately provocative, if seemingly absurd, hypothesis:
> Every ‘supercentenarian’ is an accidental or intentional identity thief, who owns real and validated 110+ year-old documents, and is passably good at their job.
[+] [-] ipsi|6 years ago|reply
> This issue presents a substantial problem for remarkable-age databases, embodied in a deliberately provocative, if seemingly absurd, hypothesis: "Every ‘supercentenarian’ is an accidental or intentional identity thief, who owns real and validated 110+ year-old documents, and is passably good at their job."
> This hypothesis cannot be invalidated by the further scrutiny of documents, or by models calibrated using document-informed ages. Rather, invalidating this hypothesis requires a fundamental shift: it requires the measurement of biological ages from fundamental physical properties, such as amino acid chirality or isotopic decay.
> Until such document-independent validation of remarkable ages occurs, the type I error rate of remarkable human age samples will remain unknown, and the validity of ‘supercentenarian’ data in question.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Finnucane|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucas_membrane|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wavefunction|6 years ago|reply
What I'm saying is that supercentenarianism seems heavily overrated.
[+] [-] gwern|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crispyambulance|6 years ago|reply
The oldest of the old don't have a quality of life that makes me (and many others) enthused about advanced age: cognitive-impairment, blindness, deafness, immobility, frailty, chronic disease-- all of these are "on the table" as normal expectations except for a few very rare exceptions.
Not to mention that at such advanced age, whether it's 95 or 105, people often need constant 24/7 care, usually from dedicated family members who sacrifice their time to extend the time of another.
[+] [-] AdrianB1|6 years ago|reply
The point? She had a very good life up to at least 90 years old, much more than most people I know personally. Reaching 100 is not the point, living 95 good years is.
[+] [-] paulmd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] futureastronaut|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wirrbel|6 years ago|reply
So I think for lack of birth certificates I can imagine the underlying process of unregistered people not being aware about their true age.
The claim that high poverty and crime rates produce such fraud feels prejudiced. also why would Sardinia be different in that regard compared to Sicily or poor regions on the Italian mainland?
Also I would be interested in how many hypothesis these researches tested on the data set and on whether they performed proper adjustments of thresholds (bonferroni correction)
[+] [-] golemotron|6 years ago|reply
Or, bureaucracy kills.
[+] [-] dwd|6 years ago|reply
Do recommendations to reduce intake or intermittent fasting rely on unverified population ages?
My personal take on living long is to get regular health checkups and seek medical care early if there are any issues.
What do people like Queen Elizabeth, Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch do to remain healthy and still working at their age?
[+] [-] raverbashing|6 years ago|reply
Sure, there might have been some time difference between date of birth from date of baptism, but it was usually short enough (even if it might have been a couple of years)
[+] [-] jobigoud|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SomewhatLikely|6 years ago|reply