You see, Chronos, when a Daddy Bald Eagle loves a Mommy Bald Eagle very much, and wants to get jiggy with her, but doesn’t want to be responsible for a aerie full of eaglets…
Okay, I don’t mean to sound like a troll, but how could her age possibly have been confirmed? If she was the oldest person, then there couldn’t be another person to say “Yes, I remember her being born on this day”.
First. Moses never existed. Seriously. The bible isn’t supernatural in origin. And some of its writers weren’t concerned with accuracy.
Second. We have records. I assume the standard is oldest living person with solid records of birth. If some dude in a hut in Vietnam is older we likely aren’t going to know it.
[quote=“Lobohan, post:83, topic:474769”]
Wow, I never even thought of that!
FTW.
Moses is not currently alive, hence he is not the Oldest Living Human.
Have you really been mulling that over for two years?
Good point. Come to think of it, now I’m wondering if the War of 1812 ever really happened… after all there are no living witnesses remaining, and I don’t remember reading about it in Leviticus.
Guys, Jeanne Calment isn’t alive either, and wasn’t alive when the OP was written. The thread title is slightly awkwardly-written, but at least know what you’re talking about before you make fun of someone (or just make fun of them for something patently ridiculous, like claiming the bible to be infallible, and then demonstrating they don’t know the bible very well.)
Just missed the ‘edit’ window, I guess.
Would you endorse a statement that they convey that which the society would like to set up as general truths? No, there is no committee that has a meeting and decides that here is this concept we want to message, and let’s make a myth about it, maybe it will go viral. But certain stories resonate enough within particular cultures to become part of their mythos because they are consistent with the emerging cultural ethos and by so doing they reinforce the development of that ethos.
Nah, of course you wouldn’t.
And here I thought this thread was going to be about the mythologically old folk living in Japan.
Of course; but that just underlines how stupid and dishonest they are. A lie is a lie even when you declare that it comes from the gods, and you can’t “set up” truths. When you try, the unpoetic name for doing so is “lying”.
How do you know that? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if quite a few myths weren’t concocted and spread by a bunch of priests who got together, collaborated on the myth and the message they wanted it to send, and then went out and pushed it in a coordinated attempt to make people believe it. Such things have happened; propaganda isn’t a recent invention.
This thread is much older than that story.
And just how the shit do you know where cultural myths really originated? Was Mark Twain lying when he wrote Huckleberry Finn?
And here’s the interesting follow-up question: was he conveying truth?
That’s a novel, not a myth. He wasn’t lying for the obvious reason that he didn’t pretend that what he wrote was real.
You didn’t answer my first question. How do you know that the people who originated these myths claimed they were literal truth? Others could have done that later.
Because that’s what people making up such nonsense do, up to the present time.
And what is the “oldest living” thread on these boards? This one’s a zombie, but there are many “confirmed” threads that are older.
Um actually he did pretend that, and he knew that his readers knew he was pretending.
Myths are the stories by which cultures articulate and promulgate their perspectives on the world and by which cultures become cultures. Those worldviews are neither provably true or false. They are what “we” are accepting as “right” and “wrong”. The story itself can be based on facts or made up, believed to be based on facts when it isn’t, or thought to be made up and actually have been based on a factual occurrence - doesn’t matter to its status as a myth.
[Attempt at redirection, albeit into a more GQ direction]
I’d say, with a virtual 100% certainty, that someone somewhere (tho most likely within the last 100 years or so) has lived longer than Calment did, but without the proper documentation it could never be proved. There’s probably a statistical method that could be used to estimate the likelihood and perhapseven the probable age at death.
Ah, so you don’t know at all. Shocker. I’ve never known someone so religious in their atheism as you, Der Trihs. You make Christopher Hitchens look like a dabbler.
I’m pretty sure that a sound statistical model would say that Calment’s lifespan was all but impossible. She would be way, way, way off to the right of any graph.
Mean life expectancy in the first world is somewhere in the neighborhood of 79, with a standard deviation somewhere in the neighborhood of 5. So 3 standard deviations from the mean would be 94. I’m pulling these numbers out of my head because they’re kind of hard to find, but I’m pretty sure they’re pretty close, and serve our purposes here. Ninety-nine point seven percent of all your data falls within 3 standard deviations of the mean. That means only 0.3% will live to be older than 94. Statistics doesn’t go into that territory much because for almost all practical purposes, it’s considered anomalous. Centenarians are outliers. Jeanne Calment is an outlier of an outlier of an outlier. I can’t imagine a mathematical model predicting someone older than her, but I’d be fascinated to be proven wrong.