She Lived 122 Years But Some Say She Was Younger

it's 1875. there are 38 states in the u.s queen victoria rules the uk the eiffel tower won't be built for another 12 years the empire state building not for another 50. the average life expectancy for a 19th century female is about 45 years one woman born this year will nearly triple that her name is jean-louis calmall she was born february 21st in arle france right at the beginning of the global industrial boom she was a year old when the telephone was invented the phonograph followed two years later then the automobile radio tv the computer and the internet over the decades by the time microsoft was founded kalman was already 100 when the first smartphone was invented she was 117. a woman alive in the 90s perhaps within your lifetime could remember when candles were used to light houses she knew a world without airplanes and spaceships the wright brothers took flight when cal mom was already a grown woman at 28. when the first person went into space she was 86 years old madame calman holds the world's record for the longest-lived person ever she survived 122 years and 164 days or did she at the age of 21 jean got married to ferdinand at that time she would wear long fancy dresses with her hair and elegant updos victorian women didn't wear pants when jean was a young adult in 1898 jean gave birth to her only child yvonne by the time her daughter was in her 30s she and her mother would start wearing tailored suits a trend started by coco chanel in the 1920s john survived a lot at the beginning of the 20th century but the worst came in 1934 her daughter yvonne passed away at 36. in 1942 jean lost her husband ferdinand by 1963 the 88 year old was left all alone she had outlived all her heirs with no one to hand the family's huge apartment down to she made a deal with her notary monsieur raf ray in 1969. jean agreed that raf ray would pay her 2 500 francs a month around the same equivalent in us dollars today for the rest of her life once she was gone he'd get the apartment sounds like a good deal to make with a 94 year old but she ended up outliving him too his widow continued the payments until jean's passing in nineteen ninety seven in total because madame cao mong had lived so incredibly long the raph rays ended up paying 11 times more than expected it's considered one of the worst investments ever made many people noted that jean was always full of energy she looked and acted 20 or even 30 years younger than her age a theory began that jean was actually her daughter yvonne and that's when all the mystery began a group of scientists decided to check if jean's extreme longevity was real for them her case was too extreme and unique not to be scrutinized cow mom claimed that it was her healthy diet and physical activity she swam played tennis and even cycled up to her 100th year she also put it down to her carefree stress-free lifestyle she never had to work a day in her long life though skeptics think that in the photos where she's 110 years old she's actually no more than 90. an expert in aging closely examined images of the super centenarian they noted no signs of age-related frailty which is typical for people living to 100 let alone two decades longer than that one mathematician even studied her genealogy and made an equation showing how slim the chances were of anyone in the family living that long researching the course of jean's incredibly long life the scientists were doubtful as to why she never mentioned several significant events that she supposedly lived through a major one being the massive cholera outbreak of 1884 she would have been nine plenty old to remember something like that yvonne hadn't even been born yet there were questions with her documents too her id card from the 1930s stated that her hair and eyes were extremely dark pretty much black but at the end of her life her eyes were gray and she had chestnut hair before it went totally white true in about 10 to 15 percent of people the eyes can get lighter with age since pigments in the iris degrade but for most people the eyes darken over the years because melanin builds up in the iris but there was also a problem with her height jean was 4 feet 11 inches yvonne was a bit taller about five feet at 114 years of age jean was still four feet 11. her height hadn't changed an inch extremely odd since people shrink as they got older because the cartilage between the joints thins out for many years john somehow managed to remain unnoticed she moved to a nursing home in 1985 when she was 110 no newspapers in aurel had mentioned any centenarian celebrating their 100th birthday 10 years prior madame calman didn't become that famous until 1988. there was a celebration of 100 years since vincent van gogh stayed in aryl john told reporters that she'd met the famous artist when he was in town she was 13 at the time she then appeared in a documentary called vincent and me in 1990 just five years later now age 120 mong got the world record for the oldest person to ever live but for some reason she'd get her husband and father mixed up in her stories she first mentioned that the family store belonged to her father but it actually belonged to fernand jean's husband jean's father nicholas cowmon was a shipbuilder he never ran any store it would make sense for yvonne to get her story wrong it was her father who owned the store one more thing that just didn't fit jean mentioned several times that a woman named marta would take her to school according to the records amarta did work for the cow moms but she was 10 years younger than jean there was no way she would take little jean to school she could however easily accompany young yvonne but the skeptic scientists didn't stop there looking at the only known photo where the two women are together they look quite different but when the researchers compared photos of young yvonne and ole jean they found a notable similarity in their facial bones noses and other features that made it seem like they were one and the same person another curious fact is that yvonne had a fibroma on the tip of her nose surprisingly in some photos zhang had the same growth could yvonne really have inherited a random growth of mutating cells in the very same place her mother had one it does seem strangely coincidental with all this the skeptics concluded that it was actually yvonne not jean who lived until 1997. their theory was that zhang is the one that passed away back in 1934 at the age of 59. the family they say then decided that the daughter would impersonate her mother the alleged reason to evade high inheritance taxes luckily her hometown arl has one of the richest and best preserved archives in the world it had plenty of interesting documents including jean's original birth and marriage certificates but oddly enough photo evidence is scarce a cousin of jean's grandson claims to have burnt all the remaining family portraits back in 1994 on jean's order it begs the question why would she have wanted that despite all the skepticism jean has still held on to her record and perhaps she's not such an outlier after all the oldest living man jeremiah kimura from japan made it to 116. in fact japan leads the world in centenarian populations they have more than 70 000 people at or over the age of 100. whether elderly jean was really her daughter or not we may never know but perhaps it's better to focus on what today's super long-lived people are doing right

Channel: BRIGHT SIDE

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Id: kakcCF8H2xU

Length: 9min 2sec (542 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020