The oldest man to ever live, Jiroemon Kimura, only lived to 116. Only 7 men have ever lived (confirmed) to 114 or older.
Now here is someone who has the health and wellness of a much younger man, claiming to be the oldest man who's ever lived by 3 years (a huge outlier!). We should have a healthy dose of skepticism of such claims.
Even Jeanne Calment is being re-examined based primarily on how much of an outlier she was at 122 years old, 3.5 years older than the next oldest person ever[0].
This is extremely hard to believe for obvious reasons.
He's a 119 year old man, men typically live shorter lives. He can still run. He looks nowhere near 119. And this is all based on a year that he verbally declared off of the top of his head years ago since he was never given a birth certificate. The four pieces of paperwork "proof" he's providing don't really mean anything, it would just mean that he knowingly or unknowingly lied to an official.
A faszinating story to read. While reason clearly says that stories like this need to be fake, one never can stop wondering whether there aren't some people who by odd chance (or very good genes) live far longer than they should. I am a bit thinking about Methuselah's Children by Heinlein here. If natural lives way beyond 100 years would be possible, one would expect a few more documented cases beyond 120 years though. But still, this is faszinating just to speculate about.
Seems there are a lot of leads to go on for someone who wanted to dig around in Chinese archives:
"He died from natural causes on 6 May 1933 in Kai Xian, Sichuan, Republic of China and was survived by his 24th wife, a woman of 60 years.[8][7] Li supposedly produced over 200 descendants during his life span, surviving 23 wives.[9][8] Other sources credit him with 180 descendants, over 11 generations, living at the time of his death and 14 marriages"
> wondering whether there aren't some people who by odd chance (or very good genes) live far longer than they should.
Exactly; death and aging are programmed. We know of hereditary conditions that cause premature aging and death; why can't the opposite exist, causing a human to age more like a tortoise.
Observation and logic unfortunately say, that while most people live between 70 and 90 years, the 110-120 years of the documented super-old might already be how far good genes can push the human life.
Looks like it's possible to do radiocarbon dating on tooth enamel. It's easiest (and most accurate) if you rely upon the byproducts of the nuclear era, but I'd guess you could also do traditional radiometric dating prior to that pulse. This paper kinda sucks, but it's what I found in 30 seconds:
No it’s not because people are born with different telomere lengths and telomeres do not shorten at the same rate or even at a predictable rate through your lifetime.
There is no typical behavior for telomeres. Even in humans they can lengthen under certain circumstances.
They do overall shorten with age but without knowing what was your telomere basepair length at birth for a given tissue (as not only length varies between individuals it varies between different types of cells and between individual chromosomes) and tracking your telomeres throughout your life you can’t get any informative data for a given individual out of it.
Yuri Deigin, the CEO of Youthereum Genetics wrote a fascinating article about why Jeanne Calment’s 122-year old longevity record may be fake. It is a long read in 3 parts [1][2][3] but reads like a really good detective story.
I'm confused about the math here. This article is apparently current (published two days ago), and given that it's 2019, if he was indeed born in 1897, that would make him either 121 or 122, not 119, right?
But the article is partly about a film documentary. Presumably the difference is the time for editing and release and he was/claimed to be 119 when it was filmed.
I didn't watch the entire video, and via Google haven't found any specific mention of him winning a particular marathon, but he has apparently won running contests in his age group as a sprinter:
> Singh carried two more documents. One listed him as the first-place finisher at 200 meters (50.26 seconds) for sprinters 100 and over at the 2014 Malaysian Masters Athletics Championships.
> A school transfer certificate had been found. Based on the certificate, he said, Dharam Pal Singh was “78 or so.” And he was not illiterate. The age was corrected on Singh’s election card, but he continued to use an old card “to hide his age,” the civil servant said.
The information above was originally included in the "Controversy section", sourced from the NYT. On June 15 2017, an editor rephrased the Wikipedia section containing the above information, and reversed the order of the two sentences. However, when they did so, they moved the citation from the _end_ of the two sentences to the _middle_ of the two sentences. Later, on August 9 2017, a different editor removed the second sentence as unsupported (because it was no longer followed by a blue [number]). Thus was the information that some documentation supported an age of "78 or so" lost from Wikipedia.
The oldest man to ever live, Jiroemon Kimura, only lived to 116. Only 7 men have ever lived (confirmed) to 114 or older.
Now here is someone who has the health and wellness of a much younger man, claiming to be the oldest man who's ever lived by 3 years (a huge outlier!). We should have a healthy dose of skepticism of such claims.
Even Jeanne Calment is being re-examined based primarily on how much of an outlier she was at 122 years old, 3.5 years older than the next oldest person ever[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Scepticism_rega...