WAS THE WORLD’S OLDEST WOMAN A FRAUD?

France’s Jeanne Calment, widely recognized as history’s oldest woman upon her death in 1997 at age 122, may have actually been a 99-yearold impostor, 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 to dodge 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The paper is not peer reviewed and relies exclusively on circumstantial evidence.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.

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.

Perhaps most notably, Calment had most of her personal papers destroyed rather than turning them over to the local Arles archive.

“Intentional, remote destruction of photos and family archives after moving to the nursing home suggests that Jeanne had something to hide,” the paper says.

The impostor theory has been dismissed by JeanMarie Robine, the French gerontologist who helped validate Calment’s age in the 1990s.

“All of this is incredibly shaky and rests on nothing,” he told Le Parisien.

Robine said he and a colleague made sure to ask Calment questions that only she would know the answer to, such as the name of her mathematics teacher. “Her daughter couldn’t have known that,” he said.

“Do you have any idea how many people would have needed to lie?” Robine told Le Parisien. “One day Fernand Calment starts passing off his daughter as his wife and everyone keeps quiet about it? It’s preposterous.”

Jeanne Calment