Old-Age Record Could Reach 130 by Century’s End

:focal(800x603:801x603)/smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com

A bar proprietress is celebrating her 101st birthday. A picture of Yoshikazu Tsuno.

In 1875, the oldest man in the union was declared to be Lomer Griffin of Lodi, Ohio. His age was 116.

There were people who doubted. Lomer's wife said he was only 103. William John Thoms, an English author and demographer who had just written a book on human longevity, expressed skepticism of all such centenarian claims. A human has a maximum life span of 100. No claim of an age over 100 had ever been verified.

He wrote that any evidence of a human having attained the age of 130 or 140 will be useless.

Over the course of hundreds of years of expert testimony, 100 years has been established as the longest possible human lifetime. He was surprised that some medical authorities still believed that a lifetime might exceed nature's limit.

Amazonaws.com/filer_public/da/74/da74a92f-71af-4a7a-9f78

Lomer Griffin was identified as the oldest man in the Union in 1875. He was held up as an example of a long life despite his age being questionable. The archive.org is forHarper's Weekly.

Scientists still disagree about what the oldest human age could ever be, almost a century and a half after the death of Lomer Griffin. More than a dozen people are alive today with ages over the age of 120, and many more are still around. Only one verified case has anyone lived past 120 years old, and that is the case of the French woman, Jeanne Calment.

The existence of a hard upper limit on human lifetimes is a topic that is debated. There is a lot of interest in understanding the limit to the human life span.

It is a question that is more important than just whether people lie about their age to get recognized. Social security and pension systems could be affected by the absence of an upper age limit. Determining whether human lifetimes have an inviolate maximum might offer clues to understanding aging, as well as aiding research on prolonging life.

Belzile and his colleagues note that recent studies have not yet resolved the issue, instead causing controversy. They suggest that some of the controversy is due to incorrect methods of statistical analysis. Their reanalysis shows that a longevity cap of at least 130 years is possible. The authors report that there is no limit to the human life span.

The analyses suggest that the human life span is well beyond any individual lifetime yet observed or that could be observed in the absence of major medical advances.

The old claims that nature imposed a strict limit to lifetime are not true. The 18th century French astronomer, Georges-Louis Leclerc, was quoted by Thoms. Despite differences in lifestyles or diet, lifetime extremes did not seem to vary much from culture to culture. The fixed laws which regulate the number of our years can't be changed because they depend on habits, customs, and the quality of food.

In every instance, mistakes had been made, such as a father confused with a son, or a birth record identified with the wrong child. Some people lied.

The lack of high-quality data makes it hard to estimate a maximum life span. Belzile and coauthors write that data on supercentenarians must be carefully and individually verified to make sure the age at death is correct.

Some collections provide verified data on the oldest of the old. The International Data Base on Longevity has information from 13 countries on people who are living to age 120 or beyond.

Multiple statistical tools are needed to infer maximum longevity. The force of mortality is a measure of how likely someone is to live a year longer. A 70 year old American male has a 2 percent chance of dying before he is 71.

Youngsters are more likely to live another year than a centenarian is, and that's because of the hazard of dying over time. Statistical methods can be used to estimate the maximum possible life span by establishing how death rates change with age.

Amazonaws.com/filerpublic/60/42/604253d1-BC70-4498-8FCb-2f560da5385f/g-probability-of-dying

Thehazard function is a measure of how likely a person is to die within a year. A 10-year-old has a very small chance of dying before 11 compared to an 80 year old. The chance of dying among the very oldest people seems to have leveled off. Statistical methods can be used to estimate the maximum possible life span by establishing how death rates change with age. Knowable Magazine contains information about the National Center for Health Statistics.

The risk of death increases year by year as you get older. The death rate goes up over the course of the adult life span. The rate of mortality increase slows down after age 80. The hazard function can be seen at some age between 105 and 112. Proper analysis requires statistics derived from those over the age of 105.

The rate of dying in each succeeding year is roughly the same for men and women, according toAnalyses of those groups. The data so far doesn't rule out a smaller annual chance of death after that.

Depending on the details of the data, a possible longevity cap is between 130 and 180. The statistics suggest a cap of at least 130. The highest ages in a large population would be infinite.

There is no chance that anyone will beat the old age record of Methuselah. A potentially infinite life span is not possible because of the lack of a mathematical upper bound.

Belzile and coauthors write that careful translation of mathematical truths into everyday language is required.

The odds of a 110-year-old living to 130 are about one chance in a million, because of a 50 percent chance of living to the next year. That is the equivalent of tossing coins and getting 20 heads in a row. If the math is correct, the old-age record could continue to climb. With the increasing number of supercentenarians around, it is possible that someone will reach 130 in this century. Belzile and colleagues note that a record much above this will be very unlikely.

Lomer Griffin's claims of reaching age 119 were exaggerated. His tombstone says he was 106 when he died, but his wife thought he was 1768. His birth record shows that Lomer didn't really reach 106. He was 104 years old when he died. He may have been the nation's oldest citizen because he was probably lying about his age as well.

The writer has a great-great-great-great grandfather.

Knowable Magazine is an independent publication.

There are some Recommended Videos.

The Ice Age was a time of cannibalism.

Evidence for the theory that early humans used to cannibalism is provided by skulls from the end of the last Ice Age.

An Iron Age Pit has 25 victims of human sacrifice.

02:50