The allure of extreme longevity has beckoned for centuries. Research careers and marketing campaigns have been built on the idea that we can live longer, healthier lives by emulating long-lived people. It is a comforting thought, frequently used for research funding bids and to sell cookbooks.
Unfortunately, the data on people living to an unusually old age is deeply flawed. I tracked down data on 80 percent of the world’s people 110 or older and found that in many cases their advanced age is highly improbable. The errors in the data were striking.
Many of the world’s oldest people are reported to be alive on paper long after they died. The first man to “survive” past 110 actually died at 65, and nobody noticed the mistake for a century. Tokyo’s oldest man was really entombed in his apartment for 30 years while his family took his pension. Japanese people incinerated by American World War II bombings have “survived” for decades in a filing cabinet as administrative zombies, their cultural practices appropriated by Westerners to sell books on their supposed survival secrets like ikigai, the Japanese concept of finding purpose in life, and the purported health benefits of purple sweet potatoes.
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