Some stuff is less damning than it sounds for example - "supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on the first of the month and days divisible by five"
One of my parents comes from a poor rural area of Europe where well into the 60s, it was normal to have a "real" birthdate & an "official" birthdate. This was because the government only issued birth certificates in the nearby city, and being poor & rural, it took time to get there by bus, etc.
So I have aunts & uncles with real-official birthdate deltas of up to 2 weeks.
I'd imagine that going back to 1900s or 1880s, when travel was more difficult, who knows. Further, it is possible that the office in some of these areas for registering births was only open certain days of month/week, the further back you go, etc.
Maybe they only went into the city on market days when they had other business, on the first Monday of the following month.
Don't discount superstition and people registering births on nearest special days like saints days, etc.
Some of these abnormalities get lost to time. Many of my family didn't realize they had a real-official birthdate gap until 30+ years later when their mother told them.
My dad is 4 years younger than his age on paper. He had no birth certificate when he was born and when he was finally being put in school, being home schooled so far, was able to answer questions like a 3rd grader. So the school decided to put him in 4th grade and just made up his birth year (dad's family knew the date but that would make him ineligible for 4th grade).
I had a great aunt (died before I was born) who believed her birthday was two months later than it actually was. The date that everyone believed to be her birthday was exactly 9 months after her parents wedding (her real birthday only seven months after).
I had another great aunt (who I did know) whose drivers license said she was ten years younger than she actually was. They just took you at your word without verifying when she got it.
>This was because the government only issued birth certificates in the nearby city, and being poor & rural, it took time to get there by bus, etc.
I guess I don't see the connection.
Why wouldn't it take a week to get the certificate for most people, and why wouldn't the authorities distinguish the birth date from the filing date?
In the US, the sort of birth certificate I have seen - from less than a hundred years ago - has three dates: Born on, Date filed, Date issued. The last two might be the same, but different from "Born on".
People who were born in the 19th century, on the other hand, may not have any documentation at all. I don't know the details, but I remember it being mentioned that nobody knew exactly how old my grandmother was, least of all herself.
I'm not sure it was a matter of transportation or poverty necessarily - just that everything wasn't controlled by documentation back then. Somewhere I think I read that passports weren't a thing until some time in the early 20th century. Maybe it changed because of WWI?
Wife's grandma recently died in her mid 90s. No one in the family actually knew how old she was. In many developing nations, such recordkeeping was often oral and unreliable.
This takes the paper at face value and I would suggest the paper is misleading. For example, the paper says...
> However, alternative explanations for the distribution of remarkable age records appear to have been overlooked or downplayed.
After reading through the original blue zones work and this paper, they didn't make a case that alternative explanations were overlooked or downplayed.
For example, when they did the blue zones work they had to spend a lot of time making sure the data was good and many places were dismissed for bad data. This paper puts a lot of focus on bad data. No kidding.
The paper puts a lot of time into covering bad data in the US. But, then doesn't take the time to point out any issues with the US blue zone.
In a place like where Sardinia Italy they call out things like the murder rate being high and a low survivability rate to 55. Except it doesn't look at people in different age groups where "blue zones" tend to be going away as younger generations eat a different diet.
There are levels to the analysis that are missing which makes the conclusions a bit misleading.
Another thing that happens is being born in a place that does birthdays on a lunar calendar, and then immigrating to a place that uses gregorian/solar, and needing to come up with a birthday in the new system.
My grandma, born circa 1900, had a birthday of Feb 14. She loved Valentines Day. The cakes she would make for that day, and other goodies... so good. My mom and I are sure she chose that day. Her parents both died when she was 8-10. Consumption.
This could be ruled out as the explanation by looking at deceased records as well - if people who died around the age of 30 in the 1950s, 40 in the 1960s etc. also all had curiously “round” birthdays then we could chalk up the fraud to poor recordkeeping instead. I’d be kind of surprised if such a coincidence hadn’t been previously noted though, surrounding discussion of the “birthday paradox” for instance.
I know some experts have poo-poo'ed the theory that Jeanne Calment's daughter impersonated her ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Scepticism_rega... ), but I don't find their arguments convincing. I'm not saying it's settled, but I think the evidence strongly points to her not being as old as she says, and I think the "experts" downplay the evidence for the switch theory too strongly, even if it is largely circumstantial:
1. The age gap between Calment and the next oldest person is the strongest evidence. It's very, very hard to ignore this.
2. As outlined in this article, there is a strong economic motive for the swap.
3. I think there is other evidence (e.g. some of the photos) that wouldn't be that strong on their own, but just add to the weight of the other, stronger pieces of evidences that there was a swap.
My maternal grandparents are in their mid 90s, my paternal grandfather passed away a week before her 97th birthday.
A lot can happen within a century and there's usually hardly anyone alive to confirm some facts. My paternal grandmother's birth certificate was gone before the end of WW2 and when asked she would give an age six years younger - initially it was to prevent a scandal because not only was my grandfather of lower status (Pah! "Just" a doctor! Scandalous, I daresay!), he was younger.
As for my maternal grandparents their age is confirmed by their marriage certificate(would be harder to obtain one with this date as a younger person), children in their late 60s and living siblings of my grandpa, of whom there are seven.
In 1965, Raffray, a lawyer in the southern French city of Arles, thought he had hit on the real-estate version of a sure thing. The 47-year-old had signed a contract to buy an apartment from one of his clients “en viager”: a form of property sale by which the buyer makes a monthly payment until the seller’s death, when the property becomes theirs. His client, Jeanne Calment, was 90 and sprightly for her age; she liked to surprise people by leaping from her chair at the hairdresser. But still, it couldn’t be long: Raffray just had to shell out 2,500 francs a month and wait it out.
This article is amusing because some countries don't have a good way of notifying institutions about deaths (like the SS death master file)...and there are lots of issues associated with dying (taxes, inheritance, loss of benefits, etc).
In those countries they just don't report the death, sometimes for decades. I used to joke that the government should have a celebration of centenarians and see how many of them actually show up.
I used to joke that the government should have a celebration of centenarians and see how many of them actually show up.
IIRC a version of this happened a while back in Japan; the mayor of a town decided to visit some of the oldest residents, only to find that none of them were still alive.
Ah yes, anybody remember the lovely insurance companies who had PERFECT data for stopping annuity payments, but somehow couldn't find the records to pay life insurance claims?
The SS death master file has been broken for a decade now. Institutions that need death information have to work with private vendors that aggregate data from a variety of sources.
The part about birthdates being on first of the month or divisible by 5 seems pretty weak to me. Records weren't great back then and many very old people may not actually know their true birthdate.
There is some statistical thing about fraud and the frequency of certain numbers being made up. I don't recall it specifically but made up amounts, dates, number have certain clusters of numbers vs what normally occurs.
edit; didn't get all that was in my head out :-)
So, it could be made up or support the fact that actual docs or good record keeping weren't a thing.
You'd have to compare with a control group. If being 100+ was strongly correlated with having a birthdate on the first of the month or such then... maybe be suspicious.
That's exactly the point - it means that someone "guessed" the date. But if they guessed the day, the year isn't reliable, either, especially at these time scales.
Supercentenarians are people over 110 (centenarians are over 100). Only about 1 in 100,000 people live this long. Around 1 in 5 people live to 90. An order of magnitude more supercentenarians than average (through fraud or error) wouldn't make a noticeable difference in the number of people living 90-99, even assuming all supercentenarians were once counted as being 90-99.
apperantly Dodo birds has marking on the bones[0] which researchers interpert it as time they struggled to find resources (simillar to tree where you move between wet and dry season).
I guess one could cross reference times of femine to a skeleton with known lifetime to see if it shows up in humans as well.
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.
Malicious 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!
A healthy diet not only makes you live longer. It also makes the experience less miserable when you reach an old age. That reason alone should be good enough.
There is also the "hill argument". Mediterranean is hilly, promoting short periods of physically intense exercise which has been proven to be vital for health of cardiovascular system (huge UK wearables study)...aka often walking uphill carrying stuff is good for you
This was posted to bioRxiv originally in July 2019. You reasonably ask why the peer-reviewed version hasn’t been published yet and why 3.5 year work with 6 citations in a hot area of research is now distracting us from ChatGPT.
> Her original validators have demanded that their opponents provide proof of the switch [7]. However, it is a central tenet of longevity validation that the onus of proof is on the validators [2,3].
The validators have proved that Jeanne Calment was Jeanne Calment. They may be have made mistakes or even lied from the beginning but in any case it is not their role to prove that there was no switch but its the role of the accusers to prove that there was one.
Taken another way, imagine a future where dramatically longer human lifespans are possible. Assuming there was fraud here, normal-lifespan individuals could pretend to be a single individual for an even greater period of time.
Even with current technology, foundations can carry on a person’s wishes far into the future. Imagine if a personalized large language model were developed to reliably predict an individual’s future verbal utterances. Could a large language model trained on a large enough corpus of data predict the next thing a living person would do or say? If so, could there be an option to transfer personhood to the language model after that person’s death?
Before judging this as impossible, think of how well our voices can be replicated by AI. As Stephen Wolfram has pointed out, this process must necessarily entail modeling the part of the cerebral cortex that produces speech.
Best would be to see such an LLM being put in charge while the person is still alive, and then laugh every time the person is frustrated with a decision the LLM decided to take.
My dad was born on an Indian Reservation in South Dakota in the 1940s or maybe 30s. He has an age for the military, an age on his drivers license, and a bunch of ages he told people over the years. Mostly bankers. For probably 20 years whenever anyone asked him how old he was he would just say 39. He got a kick out of telling people the wrong age. He still does when he meets a new doctor.
Before his older sister died, I asked her how old Dad actually was, and she said he was “about” 5 years younger than her. And her birth certificate just said “September 1933” - it’s possible the date had rubbed off but it wasn’t there.
For anyone who has ever done any genealogy work, a lot of the official census dates were just guessed at. Spellings were made up. Birthdays were made up. Kids were made up… hired hand? Count him as a kid. Second wife? Count her as a kid. It’s just some guy going door-to-door asking you how many kids you have and when were they born and he’s getting paid by the number of houses he completes that day. Does that sound prone to accuracy?
I have some Mormon relatives and it’s always really interesting how hard it is to read that old scribble from the census and family trees, the official census takers handwriting was often sloppy cursive. And the 80 year-old genealogy worker in 1974 didn’t have much better handwriting. And especially in poor areas the government officials just didn’t care that much about getting correct numbers.
The pessimist in me thinks, the longer one lives (in their 90s and 100s), the more this database analysis could discriminate using this algorithm, and flag healthy, retired centenarians from getting benefits, hopefully not putting a freeze to their accounts or causing any stir to their peaceful retirement.
I myself have a difference of exactly one year from my real birthdate and official one.
Why? Because in 80s/90s India, it was common to have 'official' birthdate extended with expectation that this will result in one additional year of government benefits. That logic does not make sense to me but was prevalent at the time of my parents/grandparents etc.
It irks me a bit at times, however, there is nothing I can really do about it at this point - all my records, passport etc. are based on 'official' birthdate. To avoid any confusion or misunderstanding, I quote official birthdate to friends and other people. Realistically, only people who're aware of my actual birthdate are my family.
Interesting that the publication is from 2020 and doesn't appear to have ever been peer reviewed. Reading through it, the data doesn't support some of the conclusions. I would take this with a grain of salt.
I wonder if a lot of things in society are going to require some kind of physical in-person proof because of our inability to distinguish fake from real at some point soon.
[+] [-] steveBK123|2 years ago|reply
One of my parents comes from a poor rural area of Europe where well into the 60s, it was normal to have a "real" birthdate & an "official" birthdate. This was because the government only issued birth certificates in the nearby city, and being poor & rural, it took time to get there by bus, etc.
So I have aunts & uncles with real-official birthdate deltas of up to 2 weeks.
I'd imagine that going back to 1900s or 1880s, when travel was more difficult, who knows. Further, it is possible that the office in some of these areas for registering births was only open certain days of month/week, the further back you go, etc.
Maybe they only went into the city on market days when they had other business, on the first Monday of the following month.
Don't discount superstition and people registering births on nearest special days like saints days, etc.
Some of these abnormalities get lost to time. Many of my family didn't realize they had a real-official birthdate gap until 30+ years later when their mother told them.
[+] [-] darth_avocado|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raldi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goodcanadian|2 years ago|reply
I had another great aunt (who I did know) whose drivers license said she was ten years younger than she actually was. They just took you at your word without verifying when she got it.
[+] [-] vba616|2 years ago|reply
I guess I don't see the connection.
Why wouldn't it take a week to get the certificate for most people, and why wouldn't the authorities distinguish the birth date from the filing date?
In the US, the sort of birth certificate I have seen - from less than a hundred years ago - has three dates: Born on, Date filed, Date issued. The last two might be the same, but different from "Born on".
People who were born in the 19th century, on the other hand, may not have any documentation at all. I don't know the details, but I remember it being mentioned that nobody knew exactly how old my grandmother was, least of all herself.
I'm not sure it was a matter of transportation or poverty necessarily - just that everything wasn't controlled by documentation back then. Somewhere I think I read that passports weren't a thing until some time in the early 20th century. Maybe it changed because of WWI?
[+] [-] 01100011|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mfer|2 years ago|reply
This takes the paper at face value and I would suggest the paper is misleading. For example, the paper says...
> However, alternative explanations for the distribution of remarkable age records appear to have been overlooked or downplayed.
After reading through the original blue zones work and this paper, they didn't make a case that alternative explanations were overlooked or downplayed.
For example, when they did the blue zones work they had to spend a lot of time making sure the data was good and many places were dismissed for bad data. This paper puts a lot of focus on bad data. No kidding.
The paper puts a lot of time into covering bad data in the US. But, then doesn't take the time to point out any issues with the US blue zone.
In a place like where Sardinia Italy they call out things like the murder rate being high and a low survivability rate to 55. Except it doesn't look at people in different age groups where "blue zones" tend to be going away as younger generations eat a different diet.
There are levels to the analysis that are missing which makes the conclusions a bit misleading.
[+] [-] elevaet|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e40|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] docandrew|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|2 years ago|reply
1. The age gap between Calment and the next oldest person is the strongest evidence. It's very, very hard to ignore this.
2. As outlined in this article, there is a strong economic motive for the swap.
3. I think there is other evidence (e.g. some of the photos) that wouldn't be that strong on their own, but just add to the weight of the other, stronger pieces of evidences that there was a swap.
[+] [-] Tade0|2 years ago|reply
A lot can happen within a century and there's usually hardly anyone alive to confirm some facts. My paternal grandmother's birth certificate was gone before the end of WW2 and when asked she would give an age six years younger - initially it was to prevent a scandal because not only was my grandfather of lower status (Pah! "Just" a doctor! Scandalous, I daresay!), he was younger.
As for my maternal grandparents their age is confirmed by their marriage certificate(would be harder to obtain one with this date as a younger person), children in their late 60s and living siblings of my grandpa, of whom there are seven.
[+] [-] ilamont|2 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/nov/30/oldest-woman...
[+] [-] jandrese|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwmma|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mannyv|2 years ago|reply
In those countries they just don't report the death, sometimes for decades. I used to joke that the government should have a celebration of centenarians and see how many of them actually show up.
[+] [-] cperciva|2 years ago|reply
IIRC a version of this happened a while back in Japan; the mayor of a town decided to visit some of the oldest residents, only to find that none of them were still alive.
[+] [-] meetingthrower|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] civilized|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QuercusMax|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gifnamething|2 years ago|reply
Exactly why they can't be trusted!
[+] [-] saveferris|2 years ago|reply
edit; didn't get all that was in my head out :-) So, it could be made up or support the fact that actual docs or good record keeping weren't a thing.
[+] [-] twblalock|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackeraccount|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] int_19h|2 years ago|reply
Here's an example of how a similar principle can be used to observe electoral fraud: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Russian_legislative_elect...
[+] [-] jedberg|2 years ago|reply
To me the biggest finding is the lack of people 90-99 in the same areas. Where are the supercentarians coming from with a lack of 90+ pipeline?
[+] [-] nearbuy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] londons_explore|2 years ago|reply
For example, there are certain cells that don't multiply after birth (eg. some nerve cells). One could presumably date carbon atoms in their DNA...
Or parts of the body that don't regenerate - like tooth enamel.
I suspect with the right type of imaging, you'd probably find 'tree rings' in things like fatty deposits in arteries too.
[+] [-] user070223|2 years ago|reply
[0] https://youtu.be/Juci-kAqjes?t=219
[+] [-] ip26|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kijin|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] docandrew|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shaky-carrousel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kosirich|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james4k|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robwwilliams|2 years ago|reply
A colleague of mine points out that for most subjects over 110 the gero-forensics seems to be well done (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nikolay-Zak-2/publicati... ).
Interesting summary on page 31, table 2, and the inevitable shoutout or shout-down of the venerable Jeanne Calment.
[+] [-] poulpy123|2 years ago|reply
> Her original validators have demanded that their opponents provide proof of the switch [7]. However, it is a central tenet of longevity validation that the onus of proof is on the validators [2,3].
The validators have proved that Jeanne Calment was Jeanne Calment. They may be have made mistakes or even lied from the beginning but in any case it is not their role to prove that there was no switch but its the role of the accusers to prove that there was one.
It's the basis of science
[+] [-] westcort|2 years ago|reply
Even with current technology, foundations can carry on a person’s wishes far into the future. Imagine if a personalized large language model were developed to reliably predict an individual’s future verbal utterances. Could a large language model trained on a large enough corpus of data predict the next thing a living person would do or say? If so, could there be an option to transfer personhood to the language model after that person’s death?
Before judging this as impossible, think of how well our voices can be replicated by AI. As Stephen Wolfram has pointed out, this process must necessarily entail modeling the part of the cerebral cortex that produces speech.
[+] [-] hobo_in_library|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] francisofascii|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbg31415|2 years ago|reply
Before his older sister died, I asked her how old Dad actually was, and she said he was “about” 5 years younger than her. And her birth certificate just said “September 1933” - it’s possible the date had rubbed off but it wasn’t there.
For anyone who has ever done any genealogy work, a lot of the official census dates were just guessed at. Spellings were made up. Birthdays were made up. Kids were made up… hired hand? Count him as a kid. Second wife? Count her as a kid. It’s just some guy going door-to-door asking you how many kids you have and when were they born and he’s getting paid by the number of houses he completes that day. Does that sound prone to accuracy?
I have some Mormon relatives and it’s always really interesting how hard it is to read that old scribble from the census and family trees, the official census takers handwriting was often sloppy cursive. And the 80 year-old genealogy worker in 1974 didn’t have much better handwriting. And especially in poor areas the government officials just didn’t care that much about getting correct numbers.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] troebr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] initramfs|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vibgyor5|2 years ago|reply
Why? Because in 80s/90s India, it was common to have 'official' birthdate extended with expectation that this will result in one additional year of government benefits. That logic does not make sense to me but was prevalent at the time of my parents/grandparents etc.
It irks me a bit at times, however, there is nothing I can really do about it at this point - all my records, passport etc. are based on 'official' birthdate. To avoid any confusion or misunderstanding, I quote official birthdate to friends and other people. Realistically, only people who're aware of my actual birthdate are my family.
[+] [-] mfer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kepler1|2 years ago|reply