I downloaded the relevant research article and it seems to give a lot in the way of speculation, but I have always had problems with this claim because it seems incredible that mathematically she could live to age 122 when the next oldest died at 119.
It’s pretty funny when you think about it. If true, I doubt she was remotely thinking about “stealing” the record as the world’s oldest person when she assumed her mother’s identity, she was just evading taxes. She surely wouldn’t have considered the possibility that she’d live to 99, and what might ensue. Did she deliberately seek to draw attention to her apparent age? Perhaps she was trapped in the lie when it started to attract attention.
Here is the link to the site from which you may download the PDF if interested:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329773795_Jeanne_Calment_the_secret_of_longevity
The photographs are especially compelling.
From the research paper linked above, she rebuffed the attempts of the mayor of the town to come in to her home and personally congratulate her on her 100th birthday. She refused, but accepted an offer to come to his office with the promise that there would be no publicity. The mayor noted at the time that she looked no more than 80 (of course everyone says that about elderly people as a compliment).
When she turned 110 and was in a nursing home some minor publicity was had. Only when the century of the Van Gogh visit came in 1988, and Van Gogh had visited her “husband’s” store did the press interview her and she became world famous.
One fact that stands out to me is that no other person aged 110 or older has been seen to walk or sit upright. She did both until her late 100-teens.
I’ll be dipped.
Since the 2nd oldest record is 119, it isn’t a huge drop. But still.
Wouldn’t be the first time it would have happened. This listing of revoked longevity claims includes no fewer than three people at one time recognized by Guinness as the world’s oldest person (Joubert, Williams, and Izumi).
She smoked and drank booze every day. I want to believe.
I’m suspect of Sarah Knauss’ claim for the same reason:
If you look at this list, you would expect the distribution you see from #3-#100. It seems incredible that Knauss and Calment would be such extreme outliers from the curve.
I was about to say that a number of oldest surviving Civil War veterans claims were debunked. I see that two are listed in your link. Several others that died younger also came into question. Stolen Valor has been around since Christ was a corporal (or was he?).
It’s very telling that all the debunked claims were by claimed Confederate soldiers. Albert Woolson, the last Union veteran, died in 1956 and is undisputed. Not only is there a lot of “Lost Cause” one-upmanship, but a lot of Confederate records were destroyed by the end of the war (making claims a lot harder to disprove).
Thats a good point. Only a small % of people make it to 100, of them barely 0.1% will make it to 110. Death rates are very high at those ages, and those 2 people have life expectancies very out of line with everyone else.
A more readable article with the evidence:
Hijack: there was an item in the paper yesterday that the last WWII vet had died. At 112. This means he was born in 1906, just like my father. What is astonishing is that that means that he was 35 in 1941. Weren’t there any who turned 18, say, in 1944 and would be only about 92 or 93. Aren’t any of them still alive?
There are plenty of younger WWII vets alive, such as my father at 92. But they aren’t older than the oldest vet, who was 112.
I’m not sure an age of 122 is as mathematically improbable as suggested. As the linked article notes:
While this is true, the issue here is not whether it’s incredibly unlikely for any centenarian to live to 122, but rather whether it’s incredibly unlikely for somebody who’s already 119 to live to 122.
That is, to test the plausibility of the two- or three-year gap between 119 and 122, we need to examine the conditional probability of somebody living to 122 given that they’ve already reached 119.
Well, assuming Calment’s claim is untested for the purposes of verifying it, then what data would we use? We have only one example of a person reaching age 119 and she died at that age. So zero percent? 
If a person lives to age 110, then they are already an extreme outlier of human longevity and the extreme claims become even more extreme. I’m obviously not a statistician, but I would expect a distribution like #3 to #100 in that list. #1 and #2 seem like outliers. You see an expected distribution, more 110 year olds, fewer 111 year olds, even fewer 112 year olds, etc. down to the end at #3.
It seems incredible that these top two should be such outliers and Calment’s claim is a full three years older than the first outlier. Of course, I guess anything is possible, but is it likely given the known distribution?
I thought the comparison of the ears and the chin was very compelling.
[Responding to Kimstu] I think the correct statistical test is not quite that, it’s the probability of seeing a single 122-year-old given the entire distribution of everyone else. But it’s hard to imagine that any statistical test would be at all reliable, because you have to extrapolate the unknown extreme tail of the distribution.
The question is, how much less likely is it that a 119-year-old could live to 122 versus living to 121, versus living to 120? You are making assumptions about “the known distribution” that aren’t really known.
In other words, the inference that there’s something fishy if we’re not seeing more 120-year-olds than 122-year-olds is not necessarily justified. To take another example, suppose somebody’s randomly flipping a coin for a while and they, improbably, flip thirty-five heads in a row, but there were no other runs where they flipped only thirty heads in a row.
In terms of basic probability, a 30-heads run is more likely than a 35-heads run so we ought to see more of the former, right? Should we assume that the 35-heads run therefore looks suspicious?
Not really: it comes down to a question of sample size and the law of large numbers and so forth. You cannot take it for granted that a particular type of very improbable event will be better represented in your limited sample than any type of event that’s even more improbable.
I.e., getting back to the verified oldest people, you’re noting that there have been several 116-year-olds and 117-year-olds and so far one 119-year-old, but no 118-year-olds. So you think that we should consider the 119-year-old’s record suspect because of that. After all, because you are probabilistically more likely to die before reaching 119 than before reaching 118, the 119-year-old is violating your “expected distribution”.
But this is not how statistics works. Any more than it’s necessarily suspect to have a 35-heads run in coin flipping when you haven’t had any 30-heads runs.
Exactly. And with sample sizes this tiny, it simply AFAICT makes no sense to try to draw inferences about any of the outliers based on what the overall distribution looks like.
Well, I don’t know anything about and am not arguing with any of the specifically forensic arguments for the fraudulence of Calment’s claim. I’m just saying that I think the naive statistical arguments for it are not persuasive.
As I said, I am not a statistician and perhaps I am committing a form of gambler’s fallacy, but I would expect that if we took all of the coin flipping every done in the world and put it into a spreadsheet at the end we would see something like:
30: 28
31: 14
32: 6
33: 2
34: 0
35: 1
If we see:
30: 4
31: 1
32: 0
33: 0
34: 0
35: 1
then I think that the guy claiming 35 is lying.
This is disappointing. The last few years of Calment’s life, the wife and I sent her a birthday card from Bangkok. We addressed them simply, “Jeanne Calment, World’s Oldest Person, Arles, France.” They were never returned, so they must have reached her.