Weaver’s five-day run as the oldest person in the world was short, but it turns out that the oldest person in the world never holds that title for very long. Since records started being kept in the 1950s, the average tenure has been just around a year, according to the Gerontology Research Group; it has dipped to just seven months since the year 2000. Weaver’s incumbency isn’t the shortest in recent years; North Carolina’s Emma Tillman died four days after becoming the world’s oldest person in 2007.
When she died, Weaver was the seventh-oldest person in verified history. The woman who preceded her as the oldest living person in the world, Japan’s Misao Okawa, died a month after she turned 117 — older than all but four other people in verified history. (Okawa credited her longevity to lots of sleep and lots of sushi.) The current oldest living person in the world, Jeralean Talley, is one of 11 children of Georgian farmers and is the 12th-oldest verified person in history; Brooklyn resident Susannah Mushatt Jones is only 44 days younger than her.
No one in the past 15 years has gotten anywhere close to the longevity of Sarah Knauss and Jeanne Calment, however. Knauss lived to be 119 years old, while Calment, a chain-smoking Frenchwoman and our modern Methuselah, was 122 years old when she passed away in 1997. (She was the oldest living person in the world for more than nine years.) They are the only two people known to have lived past 118.
More here – FiveThirtyEightLife
From the little known Michael Parkinson interview with Jeanne Calment:
“So how long have you been smoking Jeanne?”
“Since I was 12 years old.”
“And how much do you smoke a day?”
“About 20 cigarettes – 1 pack.”
“And you have lived almost 122 years?”
“Yes”
“So what do you say to those that think smoking is not good for your health?”
“I think that there are much more dangerous things to do than smoke.”
“Like what?”
“Well, interviewing the oldest person in the world can be extremely dangerous.”
“Why do you say that?”
Unfortunately, the interview was cut short at this point.
Some say it was because the set was needed to reshoot the moon landing.
Others say that Michael Parkinson was hit by a random piece of space junk.
Maybe we will never know.
Now those really know how to stay in a trend