There are many who have claimed to have been the world’s oldest person, but only one person’s claim has been thoroughly examined and validated—that of France’s Jeanne Calment (1875-1977).
Calment’s life, if true in its entirety, saw her witness two World Wars, the dawn of the age of flight as well as the heyday of the Space Age, in 122 years and 164 days. A famous photograph of her shows her smoking, and her fondness of port wine and chocolate is well-known.
But, 22 years since her death, Russian scholar Nikolay Zak from the Moscow Society of Naturalists has reopened the question of her age, making the startling claim that Jeanne died in 1935, with her daughter, Yvonne Billot, impersonating her mother to get out of paying an inheritance tax.
Now, scholars from France and Russia battle it out on academic portals as the life and times of Calment goes through yet another round of public scrutiny.
In December of 2018, Zak published a paper titled ‘Jeanne Calment: the secret of longevity’, highlighting the implausibility of a human being living to such an age as well as supposed discrepancies in her interviews and biographies, to challenge her claim as the oldest documented human being at the time of her death at the age of 99 in 1997.
His research, which was initiated by Valery Novoselov, cites her 1930s-era passport to show Calment as having a far shorter height than what was documented when she was 114 (even given the propensity of people to lose height with age) as well as a different eye colour than what was documented by Jean Allard, one of the two researchers who verified Calment’s age.
Zak says that Jeanne’s daughter Yvonne better matches with the documented physical descriptions and that it was her who died in 1997, not Jeanne, after decades of successfully duping the public into thinking that she was her mother.
Zak also tackles Calment’s most famous claim (the one that brought her to public prominence in 1975, on the centenary anniversary of Van Gogh’s dead), where he said she had met the famous painter (who she described as ‘ugly as sin’), saying that her family records do not show evidence of them owning a shop at the time.
The claim was controversial—Zak’s paper was first rejected by a Russian scientific journal as well as by the BioRxiv server, prompting him to publish on the academic social media site ResearchGate. But, it nevertheless led to calls by some to exhume Calment’s body for additional testing.
In January 2019, Zak published ‘Evidence That Jeanne Calment Died in 1934—Not 1997’. The counter came in September 2019, ‘The real facts supporting Jeanne Calment as the oldest ever human’, published by the same authors who wrote the biography of Calment’s life, amongst others.
The French researchers refute the claims of the Russian study, finding its rigour insufficient for a scientific publication, and defended their own methods of verifying Calment’s age—the outcome of years worth of asking her questions about her life which they would cross-check with other sources.
“During the three years, from 1993 to 1995, JMR and MA regularly visited and interviewed JC and despite few small inconsistencies not once did these conversations produce a suspicion of fraud and especially not a possibility of an identity switch between mother and daughter.”
The paper also stated that, while the possibility of a person reaching the age of 122 is implausible, it is not impossible. They add that it would have been impossible for the community in Arles, where Calment had become a celebrity, not to have noticed a ‘switch’ between her and her daughter.
They called for Zak’s paper, which was also published in Rejuvenation Research, to be retracted. It did not comment on the claim that Calment’s parents never owned a shop in Van Gogh’s time.
Recently, on September 23, Zak responded to the French paper, arguing that he never claimed that reaching such an age would be impossible, adding that he still awaited the “release of tapes” by the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. Zak defended his research and reiterated his call to have a DNA test settle the debate once and for all.
The debate is likely to rage on, although British scientist Dr Aubrey de Grey claimed in May 2019, that he could verify her age from a DNA test of her existing blood samples without exhuming her body.
The world’s oldest living person, at present, is Japan’s Kane Tanaka at 116.
