I’m starting a series on centenarians, people who live to be 100 years old or older, and specifically the people who have lived the longest, with documented proof. We’ll talk about each of the top 10 longest-lived persons and see how we can impact our own longevity by studying their lives.
In this episode I’ll give you the list of longest-lived people, but first I want to ask a few questions to help us think about what we expect to get from this study.
First, what was the quality of life of these people during those “extra” years? The average lifespan of a woman born in 1919 was 58. For someone my age it was 68 in my birth year of 1966. What was life like after they reached that average age, in the final years?
Second, living to be over 100 is still very rare. Though some estimates say that children born today have a 33% chance of living to be 100. But for someone born in 1919, that actual survival rate is a lot less. According to Dan Buettner in a Ted Talk from 2013, only about 1 in 5000 in the US live to be 100. Since this is such a small number of us, is anything about their lives relevant to the rest of us?
These are some questions we’ll keep in mind as we go through the list. Which I’ll now outline for you.
Number 10 on the list of people with the highest verified age.
-Maria Capovilla, Ecuadorean who lived from 1889 to 2006, a total of 116 years, 347 days
Number 9
-Misao Okawa, of Japan, who lived from 1898 to 2015, 117 years, 27 days.
Number 8
-Chiyo Miyako, also Japanese, 1901 to 2018, total age 117 years, 81 days.
Number 7
-Emma Morano, of italy, 1899 to 2017, 117 years, 137 days.
Number 6
-Violet Brown, from Jamaica, lived 1900 to 2017, 117 years, 189 days.
Number 5
-Marie-Louise Meilleur, Canadian, lived 1880 to 1998, 117 years, 230 days.
Number 4
-Lucy Hannah, United States, 1875 to 1993, 117 years, 248 days.
Number 3
-Nabi Tajima, Japan, 1900-2018, 117 years, 260 days.
Number 2
-Sarah Knauss, US, 1880-1999, 119 years, 97 days.
Number 1
-Jeanne Calment, France, 1875-1997, 122 years, 164 days.
All of these are women. The man who lived the longest was Jiroemon Kimura, who lived 116 years, 54 days. The average woman can still expect to live as much as five years longer than the average man.
I’m only looking to make it to 120, and that’s apparently already been done, so no big deal., right? Look forward to more episodes in which we look deeper into the stories of some of these amazingly long-lived people.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people
https://www.infoplease.com/us/mortality/life-expectancy-age-1850-2011
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/articles/whatareyourchancesoflivingto100/2016-01-14
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
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