Longevity Claims - Problems in Documenting

Problems in Documenting

• The first two cases of people Guinness acknowledged as having reached 113 have now been discredited.
• The first three cases of people Guinness acknowledged as having reached 114 are no longer considered verified.
• 3 people previously regarded by Guinness or the Gerontology Research Group as having reached 116 are no longer considered verified.
• The United States Social Security Administration has public death records of over 100 people said to have died in their 160s to 190s.

In numerous editions from the 1960s through the 1980s, Guinness stated that

No single subject is more obscured by vanity, deceit, falsehood, and deliberate fraud than the extremes of human longevity.

Despite demographic evidence of the known extremes of modern longevity, stories in otherwise reliable sources still surface regularly, stating that these extremes have been exceeded. Responsible, modern, scientific validation of human longevity requires investigation of records following an individual from birth to the present (or to death); purported longevity far outside the demonstrated records regularly fail such scrutiny.

Actuary Walter G. Bowerman stated that ill-founded longevity assertions originate mainly in remote, underdeveloped regions, among illiterate peoples, evidenced by nothing more than family testimony.

In the transitional period of record-keeping, records tend to exist for the wealthy and upper-middle classes, but are often spotty and nonexistent for the poor. In the United States, birth registration did not begin in Mississippi until 1912 and was not universal until 1933. Hence, in many longevity cases, no actual birth record exists. This type of case is classified by gerontologists as "partially validated".