World’s Oldest Living Person May Have Been a Fraud

France’s Jeanne Calment, widely recognized as history’s oldest woman upon her death at age 122, may have actually been a 99-year-old imposter, according to an explosive new theory being pushed by Russian researchers.

According to a paper written by mathematician Nikolay Zak and supported by gerontologist Valery Novoselov, the real Jeanne Calment died in 1934 at the age of 59. The woman who achieved fame as history’s oldest person was actually her daughter Yvonne, who assumed her dead mother’s identity in order to dodge steep French inheritance taxes. . .

The paper is not peer reviewed and relies exclusively on circumstantial evidence. One of the paper’s key evidentiary points, for instance, is a Facebook poll of 224 people reporting that Calment did not “look” like a supercentenarian. At another point, the paper tries to justify Calment’s alleged tax fraud by writing that she “hated socialists.”

Nevertheless, Zak provides evidence to show that Calment seemed to bear a closer resemblance to Yvonne than purported photos of herself as a young woman. It cites reports from witnesses, including a former mayor of Arles, saying that she looked and acted younger than her supposed age.

Zak also shows that Calment’s interviews with age verificators were replete with tiny inconsistencies, such as confusing her husband and father or saying that she was accompanied to school by a family maid who would actually have been 10 years her junior. (Read more from “World’s Oldest Living Person May Have Been a Fraud” HERE)

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