Jeanne Louise Calment spent all of her incredibly long life in Arles, France. She was born there in February 1875 and died there in August 1997. At the time of her death, she was the oldest person ever recorded—and she still is.
Perhaps she always will be.
For years, people have been saying that the first human who will live to 150 has already been born. That’s unlikely, say Jan Vijg, Xiao Dong, and Brandon Milholland, from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. After looking at demographic data from the last century, they think that human lifespan has a hard ceiling at around 115 years. A few rare individuals like Calment may surpass that limit, if only slightly, but on average, our species will not.
That seems counter-intuitive. For centuries, our average life expectancy has been going up and up. Our maximum lifespan has too: Although claims of extreme age can be hard to verify, one reliable set of figures from Sweden showed that the very oldest people reached just 101 years in the 1860s but 108 years in the 1990s.
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