‘I would compare them to Usain Bolt’: world’s oldest people attract experts and fans
Supercentenarians - or humans aged over 110 - are late arrivals to the world of celebrity. But as they age they attract intense attention from experts, investigators and internet superfans alike.
Ben Meyers is not your average party animal. Sure, he’s often busy with invitations to birthdays, but then he is 33 and a resident of fun-in-the-sun Florida. Nor does his willingness to travel distantly and often to attend those parties make him a standout, even though he’s flown as far afield as Japan for other peoples’ special days.
For all the invitations to which Meyers has happily replied “yes”, even if he has not always met the birthday boy or girl in advance, it’s the magnitude of those occasions that is most notable. Because if you combine the ages of just three people whose celebrations Meyers has recently attended, you’ll arrive at a whopping 346 years. Take the 114th birthday of Elizabeth Francis, the oldest person in Texas and seventh oldest in the world. Meyers ventured cross-country in July for her Houston shindig, which was attended by five generations of Francis’s family, including her 94-year-old daughter, with a local official serenading the tiara-clad birthday girl with a song.
In April, Meyers was in Osaka for the 116th birthday of Fusa Tatsumi, and watched on as Japan’s oldest person, who is largely bedridden, was presented with flowers and a congratulatory letter from local officials. A month earlier he was at a nursing home in Spain as Maria Branyas Morera, the oldest person on Earth, entered her 117th year.
“She was vibrant, lively, happy, making jokes,” enthuses Meyers. The founder of a newish longevity website, he posed in front of a pastel pink cake for photos with Branyas, a survivor of Covid and multiple wars and known on Twitter as Super Catalan Grandma. “We presented her with a trophy. There were speeches from her daughter [who maintains her Twitter account], her friends, from staff, expressing their love for her.”
This was the first, and potentially the only time the 33-year-old from Boca Raton will meet the 116-year-old from Catalonia, and Meyers was thrilled. “It sounds cheesy but it’s really an honour,” he says of attending some of the oldest birthdays ever celebrated anywhere. “You’re talking about people who are at the really extremely high end of human achievement. I would compare them to Usain Bolt.”
Forget mingling with the world’s fastest man. It’s with longevity, not speed, that Meyers’ interests lie. With his LongeviQuest website billing itself as “the premier database on the life and times of the world’s oldest people”, he has spent his adulthood tracking extended lifespans, swapping anecdotes with like-minded enthusiasts and poring over every conceivable statistic – the world’s oldest active barber, he reveals, is 106 and lives in Japan – and all the while maintaining his day job as an insurance broker. More than a side hustle, the business of the very, very old has become his life’s passion. And he’s hardly alone.
What’s the secret? It might vie with eternal youth for top billing, but the quest for a long life, and its keys, has been among mankind’s most enduring questions. Offered as words of comfort, as a toast, a blessing and sometimes a curse, living long may not be everyone’s ideal but it has certainly captured the attention of researchers.
“How long can we live? Can we become immortal? Can we retain youth forever?” French emeritus professor Jean-Marie Robine has confronted all these questions during his many decades as a social scientist. “There’s a big debate about what do I have to do if I want to increase the length of life, increase the quality of life,” he says. “Billions are spent year after year in medical research.”
And then along came supercentenarians – people who reach the age of 110. Having seen little significant change in human longevity before World War II, mortality rates started to change in the post-war years. Some time in the late 1950s, the first humans began to reach their 110th birthdays.
Half a century later, supercentenarians are still a scarce breed. More Australians might be living to 100, an age that not so long ago seemed unattainable, yet the pool of those who make it to 110 and beyond remains stubbornly low, according to a recent study by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
Exact numbers of global supercentenarians are unclear, thanks to a patchwork of haphazard birth records and sometimes even privacy records. The most common guesstimate is that there are around 300 alive today globally, among them South Australia’s Catherina van der Linden, who at 111 is thought to be the oldest person in Australia. But she’s still a good decade younger than the woman who sits at the pinnacle of this august group.
In terms of uber-longevity, Jeanne Calment is a superstar. Born in early 1875, and dying in August 1997, she lived for 122 years and 164 days – the oldest validated human lifespan in history. She ate close to a kilogram of chocolate a week, and as a child met Vincent Van Gogh, who she recalled was “ugly as sin”. Calment was the world’s oldest person for a formidable nine years and 205 days. (In comparison, her nearest rival, Mary Kelly of the USA, who died in 1964 at 113 years and 206 days, was the title holder for just five years and 36 days.)
For social scientist Jean-Marie Robine, Jeanne Calment was an exceptional woman. While he tends to decline official meetings with the oldest humans (“I think it’s just boring”), he made an exception for Calment. He met the supercentenarian some 40 times in the years before her death, chatting with and quizzing her, usually only in the presence of her doctor, for around 45 minutes at a time. “I was able to keep on going with the conversation with her and that was really fascinating. I had an exceptional experience.”
But it was hardly idle banter. He specifically quizzed her about matters to which he already knew the answer, dropping the name, say, of the first maid she had employed after her marriage, information he had obtained through census data. “She [Calment] was shocked. ‘Who gave you that name?’” Using other old records, he asked her about her long ago educators. “Can you imagine asking someone who is 118 if you can give me the name of your professor at school and you already have the name of this professor and you see if the person is remembering correctly or not. And she did.”
These were some of the details that Robine and others used to validate Calment’s extraordinary age, a rigorous process that was widely endorsed. “Some researchers consider that the validation of Jeanne Calment is gold standard,” Robine says proudly.
Validation is a key component of the work surrounding the oldest life spans. “Validation is crucial for scientific research,” says Australian demographer Heather Booth. “If we are to understand longevity we must start with reliable data on age.” Or as researcher Arianna Caporali, one of the organisers of November’s annual supercentenarian conference in France, says: “We need accurate information on supercentenarians because we want to figure out what is the recipe to live longer.”
Still, death and a gold standard validation did not shield the oldest supercentenarian from controversy. In late 2018, a Russian glassblower and gerontology hobbyist claimed that Jeanne Calment had in fact died in 1934, and that it was her 99-year-old daughter Yvonne – who had assumed her mother’s identity to avoid paying inheritance tax – who died in 1997.
Even now the memory of the scandal, which has since been widely discredited, disturbs Robine. From the confines of academia, he was suddenly flooded with requests from journalists all over the world to explain his work of decades earlier. The saga exposed a new reality for those who had toiled for much of their professional lives researching longevity. Having long relied on accessing old documents in situ, in recent decades vast quantities of that sort of information has become available online and today the door to longevity is open to all.
“Supercentenarians are living history,” says Waclaw Jan Kroczek, who works as a dentist in Poland. At 32 he has also spent a third of his life researching and interacting with extremely old people. When he’s not probing teeth and gums, he’s enthusing about the longest living resident in his Silesian hometown, who died at 109, and finessing his PhD on the medical evaluation of Polish people aged 105-plus. “It’s not an interest which develops in most people. Most people are interested in fashion, cars or even history,” concedes Kroczek. “Many people tend to forget that one day they will get old.”
On private web pages and open websites, longevity fans discuss and collate birthday wishes for supercentenarians who most will only admire from afar. They pore over the latest cases of the very elderly whose unlikely ages have been officially validated, and congratulate them remotely. Some collect autographs. On a recent thread on the online World Supercentenarian Forum, which bills itself as “the global supercentenarian fans’ community”, Kroczek polled the 150 members about the most significant event in the supercentenarian world in July. (Elizabeth Francis’s 114th birthday, according to respondents.)
“It usually begins with curiosity. Then you start reading scientific papers. Then you start reading reports. Then if you have enough courage you start to travel and meet those people. This,” declares Kroczek, “is the greatest adventure a gerontology researcher can have.”
His own adventures have so far seen him visit around 20 supercentenarians in multiple countries. There were three visits with Poland’s Tekla Juniewicz, who, until her death at 116 last year, for four months held the title of the world’s second oldest person. When Kroczek first met her she was 109 “and she looked to be not a year older than 80. I saw her daughter who was almost 90 years old… they looked to be sisters; Tekla looked to be the younger.”
His favourite get-together was with Emma Martina Luigia Morano, the Italian supercentenarian who was born in 1899, lived for 117 years and ate raw eggs each day. “I met the last surviving person born before 1900,” proclaims Kroczek in what, like many conversations with enthusiasts, sounds competitive, although he stresses otherwise.
“I often warn our fans that they should not consider this as a sporting event,” he insists. “These people’s lives are of great value in their own right. They should never become sporting events that compete to see who can outlive one another.” Of course, he adds, “many people develop some sort of attachment to these long-lived people”.
Supercentenarians are late arrivals to the world of celebrity. Living much of their long lives out of the spotlight, at around 110 they seem to become latter-day stars, interviewed annually for their tips on a long life, photographed beside countless admirers, their birthday parties often featuring at the tail end of local news bulletins. “It’s human achievement at the maximum level. I think we all see them as accidental celebrities,” says Meyers.
Since January that spotlight has been largely focussed on Maria Branyas Morera, who credits her longevity to “an orderly life that is socially very pleasant… a good life, without excesses”. As the reigning World’s Oldest Person (also known as the WOP), the American-born Spaniard has been bestowed many titles along the way: the last known living person in Spain born in 1907, the last known (validated) living person in Europe born in 1907, the oldest person born in California and the world’s oldest living emigrant. Apart from her 13,000 Twitter followers, more than 120 people have joined a private Facebook fan club dedicated to her.
On a blue sky day in May this year, she sat in her wheelchair as Robert Young, half a world away from his own home in Atlanta, gave a thumbs-up and had his moment with the current World’s Oldest Person snapped for perpetuity. That photo is one of several mementoes Young has posted to the Gerontology Research Group website, where official validations sit alongside countless snaps that he, and others, have taken around the world of encounters with the planet’s oldest human inhabitants.
At 49, Young has spent almost his entire life fascinated by the most elderly. “I was interested since I was about four years old and I had a great-great uncle who served in World War I and a great-great aunt, and hearing stories from a long time ago.” As a child he read encyclopaedias about old people, none of whom, he noticed, were famous. “And I wondered why do non-famous people live longer?” He was able to explore why as the online world slowly opened up. “In the early days of the internet it was mostly academics but now almost anybody can do it,” he says of the longevity research that has shaped his life. “A lot of fans decided to collaborate with research projects.”
Young has since parlayed his interest into his life’s mission. He has been Guinness World Records’ senior consultant on gerontology for 17 years. He is also director of the Gerontology Research Group, which was founded by gerontology researchers in 1990 with a mission to “slow and ultimately reverse age-related decline”, and which verifies and records the lifespans of supercentenarians. When it comes to supercentenarians, says the aptly named Young, “I am the world expert”.
As a gerontology consultant, he has debunked and validated many claimed long lifespans. “One of the biggest issues is there’s no scientific way yet to determine how old somebody is with a scientific test,” he says. “You have to think of it almost like a police investigation…You have to have enough evidence that can say beyond reasonable doubt that that person is the correct age.” Aside from collating old documents, there are physical traits, he says, that can assist: thin skin, more visible blood vessels, and less flesh on their bones, compared to your average centenarian. “If somebody has too much meat on their bones, that’s a sign that maybe they’re an impostor.”
Impostor? Not everyone, it seems, is as old as they claim. Some ages prove to be incorrect for historical reasons: a birth date might have been guessed in the absence of a birth certificate. Others might have exaggerated their age decades ago to, say, obtain a pension earlier, only for their ruse to be exposed many years later when a proud local refers them for validation.
“I would say most people have favourites,” says Ben Meyers from his home in Florida, speaking of a fan base that he estimates to be in the thousands. “In some cases there’s a bit of regionalism or nationalism involved. It’s exciting when somebody is putting the local town on the map.”
Meyer’s pet supercentenarian is Henry Allingham, the late WWI British veteran who lived to 113 and attributed his long life to cigarettes and “wild, wild women”, although he’s initially loath to name any favourite. “I get in trouble with this,” laughs Meyers, who in the months since setting up his self-funded organisation has already validated more than 100 of the most elderly alive today.
For old-school academics like Jean-Marie Robine, the arrival of so many more to his field means he has had to inject a degree of pragmatism to his vocation. “You don’t need to be an active academic,” he concedes of the widening pool of those immersed in longevity. “We are collaborating with many of these guys. Like in many scientific domains, if you want to count how many birds there are you have to work with many local lovers of nature.”
He grapples with “a kind of grey area where we have people also working on this topic, they are not really academic but they are not really amateur. We are working with them. Sometimes it’s very, very difficult.” But he is impressed with the skills of some amateurs, particularly the retired professionals in France who recently helped validate the age of Lucile Randon, the French nun who died in January.
At 118 and 340 days, Randon was officially recognised as having had the fourth longest lifespan ever. Impressive as that sounds, for those who are absorbed in this field it’s still not quite long enough. “The human longevity potential has not been breached yet,” says Robert Young. “We know that it‘s possible to extend the lifespan of primitive species. If somebody can expand the lifespan of humans, they are probably going to become the wealthiest person.”
Or as Poland’s Waclaw Jan Kroczek says of the enduring attraction: “I believe that many of the world’s population is eager to learn what we can do to achieve health longevity – perhaps even to cheat death. Who knows?” b
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