Jeanne Calment: Why France’s oldest person claim still stands

French woman Jeanne Calment remains, to this day, the oldest person ever to have lived on Earth, having died on August 4, 1997, at the age of 122 years and 164 days – three years and 157 days older than Japanese woman Kane Tanaka, the second-oldest person, who died on April 19, 2022.

Yet Ms Calment’s record continues to be challenged around the world. Some people claim it is fake.

The latest of these attempts, in 2019, involved a Russian researcher who claimed to have evidence that the woman who died in 1997 was not Jeanne Calment but rather her daughter Yvonne, who was supposed to have died of pneumonia at the age of 36 in 1934. It was suggested that Jeanne actually died that year, aged just 59, while Yvonne pretended to be her mother and then lived on to the actual age of 99.

The claim was debunked by Jean-Marie Robine, research director at INSERM, the French public research organisation. Mr Robine said the research was published in Rejuvenation Research, a scientific journal whose editor-in-chief is British scientist Aubrey de Grey, a self-proclaimed transhumanist who advocates that ageing is a treatable disease. He said Mr de Grey claims there is a scientific debate about Ms Calment’s age that could only be resolved by releasing her blood sample.

“Some people simply want to get their hands on Jeanne Calment’s blood, hoping to discover the secret to longevity. It is something akin to alchemy, straight out of the Middle Ages,” he wrote in a scientific paper.

Then there are people who have claimed to have lived longer, with no proof to back up their claims. Jeanne Calment became the oldest person in the world on January 11, 1988, as recognised by the Guinness World Records. Yet her title was briefly revoked in 1990 when Carrie C. White claimed to have been born in 1874, though four researchers believed she was actually born in 1888.

Ms Calment became the oldest person alive once again after Ms White died on February 14, 1991.

Many people have since claimed to have surpassed 122 years of age. Shirali Muslimov, an Azerbaijani shepherd, was claimed to have died at the age of 168 in 1973. An Indonesian woman named Turinah told authorities in 2010 she was 157 years old when the government conducted a census. Dhaqabo Ebba, an Ethiopian farmer, claimed in 2013 to be 160 years old. In 1998, the Los Angeles Times reported on the case of Bir Narayan Chaudhuri, a Nepalese man said to be 141 years old. 

Many researchers believe that Ms Calment’s age record will never be beaten. In a study published in Nature in 2016, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine showed that while maximum life expectancy increased throughout the 20th Century, it plateaued around 1980, before reaching a ceiling.

“Demographers and biologists have argued that there was no reason to believe that maximum life expectancy would stop increasing. Our study shows that this maximum age has already been reached and that this peak occurred in the 1990s,” they explained.

A year later, scientists at Tilburg University and Erasmus University Rotterdam claimed there is an upper limit to human life expectancy of 115.7 years for women and 114.1 years for men, though admitted in exceptional cases, people may live to just over 120.