[HN Gopher] Was Jeanne Calment (longest living well documented p...
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Was Jeanne Calment (longest living well documented person) actually
two people?
Author : briefcomment
Score : 54 points
Date : 2021-07-26 21:03 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (yurideigin.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (yurideigin.medium.com)
| adolph wrote:
| For a moment I thought the claim was Calment was a chimera as
| well as a long-lived person.
|
| _A chimera is essentially a single organism that 's made up of
| cells from two or more "individuals"--that is, it contains two
| sets of DNA, with the code to make two separate organisms._
|
| _One way that chimeras can happen naturally in humans is that a
| fetus can absorb its twin. This can occur with fraternal twins,
| if one embryo dies very early in pregnancy, and some of its cells
| are "absorbed" by the other twin. The remaining fetus will have
| two sets of cells, its own original set, plus the one from its
| twin._
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/3-human-chimeras-...
|
| Unfortunately the claim is more like identity theft. Much less
| interesting biologically.
| laurensr wrote:
| From the article, albeit a bit... buried: There is a petition to
| exhume the bodies and confirm the identity theft
|
| https://www.change.org/p/m-emmanuel-macron-p%C3%A9tition-en-...
| chrisbolt wrote:
| Has a change.org petition ever done... anything?
| Bayart wrote:
| A minor pet peeve of mine : I would like English-speaking writers
| to stop using the term << Victorian >> for places that are not
| Britain or the British Empire. There was no Queen Victoria, no
| Victorian era, no Victorian spirit in France. Indeed it was a
| time of humiliation, political instability and rampant
| nationalism, albeit on a canvas of industry.
| david-gpu wrote:
| It's a bit like asking people not to use the Gregorian calendar
| in places that are not predominantly Christian.
|
| We have to adapt our language to the person we are
| communicating with, and if they are familiar with the time
| frame associated with Queen Victoria, I can see how it makes
| sense to use it. We could refer to the period of Isabella II of
| Spain, but they wouldn't understand us, so it would be rather
| pointless.
| nescioquid wrote:
| I'm a native English-speaker, and the use of the term
| similarly annoys me, though only just a little. Why not be
| clearer an simply say "19th century" (early/mid/late)?
|
| Reminds me of the story of the British headline "Fog in
| channel -- continent cut off".
| skissane wrote:
| > It's a bit like asking people not to use the Gregorian
| calendar in places that are not predominantly Christian.
|
| I think it is different in that numbering years is useful,
| and we need to have an agreed starting point, and by
| historical accident we've all adopted an estimated (albeit
| likely incorrect) birth year for the founder of one of the
| world's major religions. It is hard to pick a culturally-
| neutral starting point - astronomers sometimes use the Julian
| period starting at 4713 BCE, but while that is more
| religiously neutral it still isn't culturally neutral. (It is
| based partially on astronomy, but also partly on the taxation
| cycle of the ancient Roman Empire, and that's still Western-
| centric.)
|
| By contrast, applying _names_ to periods of time is far less
| useful and far less portable across cultures. The 1800s
| looked very different in different parts of the world, but it
| was the same 100 year span everywhere. And we only do this
| for a handful of historical periods anyway (mostly seem to be
| named after British monarchs - Victorian, Georgian,
| Edwardian, etc). Applying those period names to places
| outside the British Empire is a bit like applying Japanese
| era names to European history. The whole thing of historical
| era names seems to be somewhat dying anyway - references to
| decades (the 1990s, the 1920s, etc) seems more popular in
| discussing more recent history - the Elizabethan era was in
| the 16th and very early 17th century, not in the 20th and
| early 21st.
|
| > We have to adapt our language to the person we are
| communicating with, and if they are familiar with the time
| frame associated with Queen Victoria, I can see how it makes
| sense to use it. We could refer to the period of Isabella II
| of Spain, but they wouldn't understand us, so it would be
| rather pointless.
|
| "mid-to-late 19th century" covers roughly the same timeframe,
| and everyone knows what that is.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > By contrast, applying names to periods of time is far
| less useful and far less portable across cultures. The
| 1800s looked very different in different parts of the
| world, but it was the same 100 year span everywhere. And we
| only do this for a handful of historical periods anyway
| (mostly seem to be named after British monarchs -
| Victorian, Georgian, Edwardian, etc). Applying those period
| names to places outside the British Empire is a bit like
| applying Japanese era names to European history.
|
| Sure, but a lot more of the world was part of the British
| Empire during those periods than has ever been part of the
| Japanese (and there's a lot of second-order uses for
| cultural/artistic trends that originated in the British
| world of those times but are found elsewhere, e.g.,
| "Victorian architecture".)
| philwelch wrote:
| It's still a political decision though. The Romans would
| elect new consuls each year so instead of numbering their
| years, they just designated them by whoever were the two
| consuls that year. Later scholars numbered the years since
| the supposed founding of Rome. The French Revolutionaries
| created a calendar where Year 1 was the founding of the
| First Republic, but it didn't catch on.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Gregorian calendar was directly adopted in many places. It is
| still Gregorian calendar in France as is Ming vase sitting in
| a museum in New York. Arabic numerals used on Space Station
| do not stop being arabic just because there is no Arab in
| sight.
| philwelch wrote:
| My impression of the Victorian era is that the British Empire
| dominated world affairs for most of that period, making them a
| natural centre of attention for historians of that period.
|
| You don't have to look too long before the Victorian era to
| find an era where France is the undisputed center of attention
| in Western history.
| trishika wrote:
| https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/74/Supple...
| lacker wrote:
| I am convinced that Jeanne Calment was actually two people. She
| is a fairly strange outlier in the record of the oldest people:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...
|
| The oldest person on record is Jeanne at 122, then one 119, then
| one 118, then the next seven are at 117, then the next thirteen
| are at 116. She's just an extreme outlier from the rest of the
| distribution.
|
| Also, in the 25 years since Calment, the distribution of
| subsequent extremely old people has seemed unchanged. Nobody has
| gotten any closer to Calment, although we've had far more people
| in the 114-117 range. It all points to a faked data point.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| If this theory is true I guess it means she died at around 100,
| which is still honourable.
|
| It would have been interesting if she had lived to 120 like a
| real supercentenarian, which means the fake age of 142. Then at
| least we would have been sure that something's off.
| alain94040 wrote:
| Debunked, see study mentioned in https://www.bbc.com/news/world-
| europe-49746060
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Fake supercentenarians have been used by multiple governments in
| the past to glorify their lifestyle. USSR did the same, claiming
| that Shirali Muslimov reached 168. China also has fake "longevity
| villages" that draw some tourism.
| kevinpet wrote:
| I read up on this when the article first came out, and what
| really stood out was the way the supports of Calment's claim /
| debunkers of the new theory would ignore how their supposed
| evidence did or did not fit in. IIRC, the Guinness authenticator
| talked a lot about how they authenticated the birth records and
| other types of records, which is irrelevant to this particular
| claim.
| j_leboulanger wrote:
| I feel like the pictures shown on the article demonstrate the
| opposite of the author theory.
|
| When the author writes things like "undeniable", the resemblance
| is more questionable than undeniable when he tries to match the
| pictures of Yvonne with the ones of the 122 years old women.
|
| I was not convinced at all by the article.
|
| Moreover in such a rich family in France, changing identity like
| this would have been spotted really quickly.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| I agree that some of the photo comparisons were weird.
|
| The rest however was indeed very convincing to me. Mismatched
| eye color, height and appearance untypical of that age, and
| cognitive tests that estimated a much younger age? That's not
| something you can just discard imho, and those are the metrics
| you can hardly fake.
|
| > changing identity like this would have been spotted really
| quickly.
|
| Unless the people close to her didn't have an interest in
| spilling the beans.
| fieryskiff11 wrote:
| Evidence That Jeanne Calment Died in 1934--Not 1997
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6424156/
| rscoots wrote:
| I remember seeing this article awhile back.
|
| Really made me realize that sometimes simple, trivial things that
| everyone takes as fact really cannot be trusted.
|
| The notion that Coco the gorilla could do sign language was
| another one that stuck with me.
|
| Anyways, I think the best evidence 'against' Jeanne is that no
| other super-old person simply looked (both outwardly and
| physiologically) like someone 20 years thier junior. All the
| medical evidence points to her not actually being the age she
| claimed she was.
|
| I'm of the opinion the 2nd place woman is also not legitimate.
| She probably just lied about her age so she could marry and then
| lived incredibly long.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Knauss
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > I'm of the opinion the 2nd place woman is also not
| legitimate. She probably just lied about her age so she could
| marry and then lived incredibly long.
|
| From that link:
|
| > The 1891 directory records that the 1890 US census listed
| Sarah D. Clark as age 10, which is roughly consistent with a
| September 1880 birth date.
| rscoots wrote:
| Yea, looks like that source came out Dec 2019 which is after
| I first looked into this.
|
| Very interesting & well written write up! Even though
| Wikipedia says "Better source needed" for whatever reason.
|
| The author still casts a good amount of doubt on her claim
| though, and even assuming the existing evidence is correct
| she still couldve been 116 it says.
|
| But yea as long as you don't have birth certificates or
| baptism records I guess that would always be true.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There's the observation that the one modern social phenomenon
| that's been most strongly associated with a reduction in the
| number of superannuated persons in a population is accurate
| demographic recordkeeping.
|
| See, e.g.,
| https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/06/are-superc...
| xdennis wrote:
| This is like the UFO observation: camera sensors have
| improved, but UFO videos stay the same (low details and
| ambiguous).
| astrange wrote:
| > Really made me realize that sometimes simple, trivial things
| that everyone takes as fact really cannot be trusted.
|
| One I've noticed is "Einstein was super smart" when a simpler
| theory is "Einstein didn't cite prior work so everyone thought
| he did it."
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(page generated 2021-07-26 23:00 UTC)