Well,maybe there are more 19th century people than I thought.Still,however,even if there are 3,000 of them today,in all probability they will all be gone by 2025,which isn’t so long from now.In fact,if the very youngest of them,born in 1899,lives even to 2024,they will already have broken Jeanne Calment’s record,and even though that is very possible,if not likely,I doubt many people will reach the 125 mark for a while.Of course,I certainly could be wrong about all of this,that’s just my guess.
Looking at the wiki history, there were 84 living supercentenarians born in the 19th century, and of those, 44 born in the 1800s.
The current list shows 52 in the 19th century and 25 in the 1800s.
So, I’m inferring from this that the “half-life” of a population of centenarians is about 50%. If that holds up, we should still have folks with 189~ as birthdate for at least three more years–and even longer if we extend the population to the “19th century.”
Is this supposed to be a very complicated way of saying that 40 of them were born in the year 1900?
So what about the other 32 “living supercentenarians” you just mentioned? Why aren’t they on this list? In fact, what two lists are you talking about?
Of course, the farther back in time you go, the more tenuous the evidence for centenarians becomes. That said, though:
The mathematician/astronomer Nilakantha Somayajin from southwest India has a fairly definite recorded birthdate of 14 June 1444 and a quite plausible attestation in a later work as still living and active in 1544.
Nilakantha’s teacher’s father, Paramesvara (14th-15th c.) is also claimed to have had a remarkably long professional career that would imply a lifespan of well over ninety years, so he may have made the cut as well. (Even today, the Kerala region in southwest India has significantly higher average life expectancy than the rest of India. It doesn’t stretch credibility too much to hypothesize that the occasional wealthy elite male there in pre-modern times who made it to old age could have lived to what would be considered even today extreme old age.)
Farther back, the 8th/9th c. Muslim astronomer Habash al-Hasib was reputed to have lived to 100.
Sorry, left out a couple of wordw. It should have started with “Looking at the wiki history from one year ago. . .” I was comparing the list from a year ago to the current list to show the numbers drop.
The other part was just a reminder that when the “19th century,” that can be interpreted as “the 1800s,” and while they’re almost 100% the same time frame, they’re not exactly.
Some people feel that the sixth dynasty pharaoh Pepi II lived to be 100, others feel it was only 94.Pepi II Neferkare - Wikipedia
The problem you get into is the lack of birth records for most people. Many U.S. states didn’t require birth certificates until well into the 20th century and before that you have to make do with church records and deeds when they’re available and even still they can be wildly unreliable. If you look in the 1900 Census, which the first to record birth month and year, and especially if you look in the poorer areas and in areas with lots of immigrants or lots of black people who were born slaves, you’ll see the month left blank or question marks or “unknown” in many of the records. There were possibly some centenarians who didn’t know it- especially if their mind was a bit cloudy, and there were probably lots of people who “I’ve always known him and he’s always been old so he must be north of 100 by now” when in fact they were just in their 80s or 90s.*
Royalty and high nobility and the occasional priest or high ranking churchman are about the only birth dates we can be reasonably sure about (and even some kings and nobles have dates that vary a few years one way or the other).
Is it possible to tell from remains (say, Ramses II’s mummy, which is intact) whether they were probable centenarians? Or can you just tell “they were really old”?
*Relevant adventures in genealogy:
I’ve read lots of affidavits from self proclaimed veterans of the Revolutionary War who were applying for various federal pensions or state land grants many years later. One that I researched because of a possible family connection (still don’t know) was from an old man in 1836 who stated that he didn’t know anything about when he was born other than his mother said their was snow on the ground so it must have been in winter, and he thought it was in North Carolina but it might have been in South Carolina. He said that he knew he married his first wife in 1759 because that was written down. This means that if he was right then he was probably born in the 1730s, possibly the early 1740s; the old man was still alive in 1841 per a state census, when he might have been in his late 90s, he might have been 110, or he might have been 80 and just lying to get that $40 a year pension.
One of my known direct ancestors, a farmer/lawyer named Joseph White, was born in N. Ireland and died in Anson County, NC, in 1808. Newspapers hundreds of miles away mentioned his death for its oddity, saying he was 112 years old. From various records of his life it is clear that he was at least in his mid 90s, but also clear he was not much if any older than that; I’d give 100:1 odds against him being a centenarian at all and 10,000,000:1 odds against him being within a decade of 112. My guess is this just got started because you had people who had known him for 40 years or more “and he was old even then” and it just sort of got embellished.
There were Romans who had fought at Cannae (216 BC) and lived to see the fall of Carthage, 146 BC. They would have been in their 90’s at least
It’s a very widespread misconception that “average life expectancy of 45 years” means that most people dropped dead in their 40s. It does not mean that and never has meant that. What skews the figures is childhood mortality.
If you were lucky enough to survive childhood, you had almost as much chance of reaching a ripe old age as anyone alive now. If you remove the effects of childhood mortality (by not counting the people who died under the age of 10) then the average life expectancy in the middle ages was not that far from modern life expectancies. Most adults survived well into their 60s, and people in their 70s or 80s were not all that remarkable.
The biggest reason we don’t have reliable records of centenarians from earlier centuries is that reliable record-keeping is a modern innovation.
It is true that the low life expectancy was largely due to childhood mortality,and it’s also true that it wasn’t terribly rare for a person long ago to reach their 70s and 80s.However, I imagine that it still was very,very uncommon for people to reach their 100s.With the medical knowledge they had then,it’s amazing any did.In fact,there are people who believe that we only started reaching our 100s in the last century or so(although,of course,we know of many earlier ones whose cases are pretty well documented,so obviously this isn’t true).
The life expectancy of a 50-year-old person was about seven to nine years less 100 years ago. I would expect that the life expectancy of a 50-year old would be a few less years less than that going back to the 1600s or so, but not a lot. You can look at the popes for example (all of whom were up in years at the time of their [don’t know the word]), and their average was in the mid 70s or so.
My great-grandmother came very close - she was five when Lincoln was shot, and remembered her father bringing the news home to her mother. She died in 1962, a year before the Kennedy assassination.
The word you were looking for is “election”.
Of course, if you believe the Bible, people between Adam and Noah routinely lived 800 or 900 years.
I agree that many old birth records are of dubios reliability. But England has had birth registration since the 1500’s-have these records yielded any evidence of unusual lifespans?
I concur with this. I read about one demographic study involving 16th and 17th century guild records (so, middle-class men with a viable trade and a social support network who had already lived at least into adolescence – which meant their chances of surviving into old age were better than most people’s). Except for epidemics, the death rate stayed relatively steady, and relatively low, from people’s late teens into their early sixties, and then climbed sharply beginning around age 63 or so. There were a few guild members who made it into their late 70s or 80s, and I think one who lived to be 90, but they were a distinct minority.
Well,yes,but I mean people since the end of Bible times.
When looking this kind of lists, I’m always struck by the over-representation of some nationalities (namely, USA, Japan, France). Obviously, develloping countries might lack old official birth records, and in the case of the USA, it might simply the result of a much larger population. But what about other western countries?
For instance on this list, you have 1 German (Germany population : about 80 millions) for 9 French (pop 60 millions) and 25 Japanese (pop 120 millions). How comes?
In fact, believing that once you ignore childhood mortality, the life expectancy in older eras was close to that of the modern era is also a misconception (and fueled in part by the longevity of famous people, because you generally need to to live quite long to become famous. Even famous kings are those who lived, and reigned, unusually long hence had time to do a lot of things).
My usual example for this are the French kings who reigned from 1000 to 1500. Not taking into account John II who died in infancy, and knowing that none died in battle or in similar artificially life-shortening way, the median age at death was in the late 40s, and only one made it to 60.
That’s definitely not the kind of life expectancy you’re looking for in the modern era. Dying in your 40s wasn’t particularly unusual, in fact.
Combination of high quality health care with a healthier diet? I wouldn’t argue the science as I’m no dietician, but my understanding is that it has been argued that pre-recently ( 
) Japanese diets vied with Mediterranean diets as one of the better balanced. This may be changing nowadays with the addition of more red meat and indulgent processed treats.
Philip III went at age 40 via camp dysentery contracted during the siege of Girona, so I’d chalk that one up to a war death.
Disease took quite a number of French kings at a youngish age. Hardly remarkable given the state of medicine then, which of course speaks to your point. Something like pneumonia ( which may have killed Louis X at 27 ) is potentially dangerous now, back then it was all the worse.
ETA: Oh and you meant John I ( 1316-1316 ). John II lived to the ripe old age of 45 ;).