Maximum human lifespan

Assembled from 14 blocks · 2 evidence · 10 related

1. Story
2. The longest age any human being has been shown to reach, and the contested question of whether it is a fixed biological ceiling. The record has stood since 1997 at 122 years and 164 days. That is the fact that resists every optimistic reading of the demographic transition: hundreds of millions more people now reach old age than in 1900, which should by itself produce more record-holders, and the record has not moved in nearly three decades. Dong, Milholland and Vijg argued in Nature in 2016 that the maximum reported age at death plateaued around the mid-1990s and inferred a natural limit near 115 years; the paper drew several published technical rebuttals disputing the statistical treatment of an extreme-value problem with very sparse data. The honest position is that the data cannot presently distinguish a hard ceiling from a soft one that the current population is not yet large enough to breach.
3. Knowledge
4. Maximum human lifespan
5. Connections
6. Compression of mortality (rectangularisation of the survival curve)
7. Jeanne Calment
8. Blue Zones
9. Jeanne Calment dies at 122 years and 164 days
10. A natural limit to human lifespan is argued for, and disputed
11. Calment's record is publicly challenged
12. Evidence
13. Supports the argument for a natural limit near 115 years and, equally, the existence of substantial published dissent from its statistical treatment. V55 verification basis: neither the paper nor the comments were retrieved.
14. Supports the validation of Jeanne Calment's age as 122 years and 164 days. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session.