It Smells Like Bullshit to Me

Today's big "scandal" is a report that French supercententarian Jeanne Calment, the woman who has long been considered the oldest person to have yet lived when she died at age 122 in 1997, was actually a fraud.  She supposedly added 23 years to her age because, according to the report, she was in reality her daughter Yvonne rather than Jeanne.  Her daughter died in 1934, but according to these muckrakers or buckrakers, it was Jeanne who actually died that year.  According to these "researchers," Yvonne, who allegedly adopted her mother's name, in reality lived to a mere 99 years of age.

Call me extremely cynical here.  There are numerous experts who studied Calment who insist her super advanced age was for real.

The report, by a pair of Russians seeking to debunk Calment's claims, is here.  Their claim lies in the theory the fraud was perpetrated in order to avoid inheritance taxes.

The Russians really have a lot of room to talk when it comes to fraud and supercentenarians.  Recall, if you were around then, the old USSR and its bragging about how long people lived under communism, especially old people in the republic of Azerbaijan.  Literally dozens if not hundreds of people were claimed to have lived to be over 100, far above the country's average life expectancy, let alone the rest of the world, with the most absurd claim made for Shirali Muslimov, who died in 1973, at allegedly 168 years of age.  These claims have long since been debunked.

Video clip of Muslimov:



Given how mobile he was in the clip and given how he looked, I seriously doubt he was even in his 90s then.  At most he was in his early 90s.  His wife was probably near his own age.

From the first linked article about Calment:

Meanwhile, Jean-Marie Robine, the French gerontologist who helped validate Jeanne Calment’s extreme age in the 1990s, is dismissing the age-faking theory as nonsense.

“All of this is incredibly shaky and rests on nothing,” he said, according to the National Post.

While researching Jeanne Calment’s claim she was born in 1875, Robine said, he and a colleague made sure to ask her questions that only she would know the answer to, such as the name of her mathematics teacher.

“Her daughter couldn’t have known that,” he said.

Robine is also skeptical that a lie of that magnitude could be kept secret for more than 80 years.

“Do you have any idea how many people would have needed to lie?” Robine said. “One day Fernand Calment starts passing off his daughter as his wife and everyone keeps quiet about it? It’s preposterous.”

I take the Russians' claim with a giant grain of salt.