Jeanne Calment
Jeanne Louise Calment was a French supercentenarian. With a documented lifespan of 122 years and 164 days, she is the oldest person in history whose age has been verified. Her longevity attracted media attention and medical studies of her health and lifestyle. Calment is the only person in history who has been verified to have reached the age of 120.
According to census records, Calment outlived both her daughter and her grandson. In January 1988, she was widely reported to be the oldest living person in the world. In 1995, at age 120, she was declared to be the oldest person in history with a verified date of birth.
Early life
Calment was born on 21 February 1875 in Arles, Bouches-du-Rhône, Provence. Some of her close family members also had above-average lifespans. Her older brother, François, lived to the age of 97; her father, Nicolas, who was a shipbuilder, lived to be 93 years of age; and her mother, Marguerite Gilles, who was from a family of millers, lived to be 86 years of age.From age seven until her First Communion, Calment attended Mrs Benet's church primary school in Arles, and then the local collège, finishing at 16 with the brevet classique diploma. Asked about her daily routine while at primary school, she replied that "when you are young, you get up at eight o'clock". In lieu of a solid breakfast, she would have either coffee with milk, or hot chocolate, and at noon her father would pick her up from school to have lunch at home before she returned to school for the afternoon. In the following years, she continued to live with her parents, awaiting marriage, painting, and improving her piano skills.
Adult life
On 8 April 1896, at the age of 21, Jeanne married her double second cousin, Fernand Nicolas Calment. Their paternal grandfathers were brothers, and their paternal grandmothers were sisters. He had reportedly started courting her when she was 15, but Jeanne was "too young to be interested in boys". Fernand was heir to a drapery business located in a classic Provençal-style building in the centre of Arles, and the couple moved into a spacious apartment above the family store. Jeanne employed servants and never had to work; she led a leisurely lifestyle within the upper society of Arles, pursuing hobbies such as fencing, cycling, tennis, swimming, rollerskating, playing the piano, and making music with friends. In the summer, the couple would stay at Uriage for mountaineering on the glacier. They also went hunting for rabbits and wild boars in the hills of Provence, using an "18mm rifle". Calment said she disliked shooting birds. She gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Yvonne Marie Nicolle Calment, on 19 January 1898. Yvonne married army officer Joseph Billot on 3 February 1926, and their only son, Frédéric, was born on 23 December of the same year. At the outbreak of World War I, Jeanne's husband Fernand, who was 46, was deemed too old to serve in the military.Yvonne died of pleurisy on 19 January 1934, her 36th birthday, after which Calment raised Frédéric, although he lived with his father in the neighbouring apartment. World War II had little effect on Jeanne's life. She said that German soldiers slept in her rooms but "did not take anything away", so that she bore no grudge against them. In 1942, her husband Fernand died, aged 73, reportedly of cherry poisoning. By the 1954 census, she was still registered in the same apartment, together with her son-in-law, retired Colonel Billot, Yvonne's widower; the census documents list Jeanne as "mother" in 1954 and "widow" in 1962. Her grandson Frédéric Billot lived next door with his wife Renée. Her brother François died in 1962, aged 97. Her son-in-law Joseph died in January 1963, and her grandson Frédéric died in an automobile accident in August of the same year.
In 1965, aged 90 and with no heirs left, Calment signed a life estate contract on her apartment with civil law notary André-François Raffray, selling the property in exchange for a right of occupancy and a monthly revenue of 2,500 francs until her death. Raffray died on 25 December 1995, by which time Calment had received more than double the apartment's value from him, and his family had to continue making payments. She commented on the situation by saying, "in life, one sometimes makes bad deals". In 1985, she moved into a nursing home, having lived on her own until the age of 110. A documentary film about her life, entitled Beyond 120 Years with Jeanne Calment, was released in 1995. In 1996, Time's Mistress, a four-track CD of Jeanne speaking over musical backing tracks in various styles, including rap, was released.
Oldest documented human
Longevity records
In 1986, Calment became the oldest living person in France at the age of 111. Her profile increased during the centennial of Vincent van Gogh's move to Arles, which occurred from February 1888 to April 1889 when she was 13 and 14 years old. Calment claimed to reporters that she had met van Gogh at that time, introduced to him by her future husband in her uncle's fabric shop. She remembered that van Gogh gave her a condescending look, as if unimpressed by her. She described his personality as ugly, ungracious, and "very disagreeable", adding that he "reeked of alcohol". Calment said that she forgave van Gogh for his bad manners.She was recognised by The Guinness Book of Records as the world's oldest living person in 1988, when she was 112. However, the Gerontology Research Group has since then validated the age of Easter Wiggins, meaning that in reality Calment became the world's oldest living person in 1990. At the age of 114, she briefly appeared in the 1990 fantasy film Vincent and Me, walking outside and answering questions.
Calment's status further increased when Guinness named her the oldest person ever on 17 October 1995. This was based on her surpassing the now-debunked age claim of Japanese man Shigechiyo Izumi. As a result of Izumi's validation being withdrawn, Calment had already been the oldest person ever since surpassing the age of Easter Wiggins on 30 March 1991. Far exceeding any other verified human lifespan, Calment is widely regarded as the best-documented supercentenarian recorded. For example, she was listed in fourteen census records, beginning in 1876 as a one-year-old infant. After Calment's death, at 122 years and 164 days, then almost 117-year-old Canadian woman Marie-Louise Meilleur became the oldest validated living person. Several claims to have surpassed Calment's age were made, but none have been verified. For about three decades, Calment has held the status of the oldest human being whose age has been validated by modern standards.
Age verification
In 1994, the city of Arles inquired about Calment's personal documents, in order to contribute to the city archives. However, reportedly on Calment's instructions, her documents and family photographs were selectively burned by a distant family member, Josette Bigonnet, a cousin of her grandson. The verification of her age began in 1995 when she turned 120, and was conducted over a full year. She was asked questions about documented details concerning relatives, and about people and places from her early life, for instance teachers or maids. A great deal of emphasis was put on a series of documents from population censuses, in which Calment was named from 1876 to 1975. The family's membership in the local Catholic bourgeoisie helped researchers find corroborating chains of documentary evidence. Calment's father had been a member of the city council, and her husband owned a large drapery and clothing business. The family lived in two apartments located in the same building as the store, one for Calment, her husband and his mother, one for their daughter Yvonne, her husband and their child. Several house servants were registered in the premises as well.Popular media reports
media articles reported varying details, some of them unlikely. One report claimed that Calment recalled selling coloured pencils to Vincent van Gogh, reportedly remembering him later as "dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable", and seeing the Eiffel Tower being built. Another wrote that she started fencing in 1960, aged 85. Calment reportedly ascribed her longevity and relatively youthful appearance for her age to a diet rich in olive oil.Controversy regarding age
Demographers have highlighted that Calment's age is an outlier, her lifespan being more than three years longer than the next oldest people ever documented, where the differences are usually by months or weeks. There have been various speculations about the authenticity of her age. In 2018, Russian gerontologist Valery Novoselov and mathematician Nikolay Zak revived the hypothesis that Jeanne died in 1934 and her daughter Yvonne, born in 1898, assumed her mother's official identity and was therefore 99 years old when she died in 1997. Around the same time, a series of related posts by gerontology blogger Yuri Deigin, titled "J'Accuse!", had gone viral on Medium. This hypothesis is considered weak by mainstream longevity experts, such as French gerontologist Jean-Marie Robine, who pointed out that during his research, Calment had correctly answered questions about things that her daughter could not have known first-hand. Robine also dismissed the idea that the residents of Arles could have been duped by the switch. Another doctor who had helped verify Calment's records said that the team had considered the identity-switch hypothesis while Calment was still alive because she looked younger than her daughter in photographs, but similar discrepancies in the rates of aging are commonly found in families with centenarian members.After consulting several experts, The Washington Post wrote that "statistically improbable is not the same thing as statistically impossible", that Novoselov and Zak's claims have been dismissed by the overwhelming majority of experts, and that those claims are "lacking, if not outright deficient". In September 2019, several French scientists released a paper in The Journals of Gerontology pointing out inaccuracies in the Zak et al. paper.
The team presented evidence to support Calment's age – including multiple official documents, census data, and photographic evidence – and also argued that it was indeed statistically possible to reach Calment's age. The authors criticised the advocates of the identity switch hypothesis, and called for a retraction of Zak's article. In February 2020, Zak and Philip Gibbs published an assessment applying Bayes' theorem to the question of her authenticity, noting that, while being subjective, it gave "a 99.99% chance of an identity switch in the case of Mme Calment". François Robin-Champigneul and Robert Young commented on Zak's and Gibbs' findings, with Robin-Champigneul saying that it "appears to be in fact a subjective and nonrigorous analysis", and Young saying that "gnoring the actual facts of the case and stringing together opinions in a 'Bayesian' analysis are to merely misuse a mathematical tool". Young is said to have found that "a very solid case that Jeanne was 122 years has already been made" but that biosampling was still needed to test "for biomarkers of extraordinary longevity". Robin-Champigneul stated that "the hypothesis of an identity swap with her daughter appears not even realistic given the context and the facts, and not supported by evidence".
Since Jeanne Calment had 16 distinct great-great-grandparents while her daughter Yvonne had only 12, geneticists have noted that the question of identity could easily be settled by a test for autozygous DNA if a blood or tissue sample were to be made available.