The Oldest People in Recorded History — and What They Had in Common

Jeanne Calment: The Undisputed Record Holder

Jeanne Louise Calment was born in Arles, France on February 21, 1875, and died on August 4, 1997 — aged 122 years and 164 days. She is the only person in recorded history whose age has been confirmed beyond 122 years by independent researchers through documentary evidence. Her longevity has been verified using French civil records, church registries, and census data.

Calment's life spanned an extraordinary range of history. As a child, she knew Vincent van Gogh personally — he visited her father's art supply shop in Arles when she was around 13. She witnessed the construction of the Eiffel Tower, the invention of the automobile, two World Wars, the moon landing, and the emergence of the internet. She did not retire until her nineties. She smoked until age 117, when poor eyesight made it too difficult. She attributed her longevity to olive oil (applied to her skin as well as consumed in food), a diet rich in chocolate (up to 2 pounds per week in her prime), and what she described as an ability to avoid worrying about things she could not change.

The Top 10 Oldest Verified People in History

A striking feature of this list: nine of the ten are women. The gender gap in extreme longevity is one of the most consistent findings in gerontology — women consistently outlive men across virtually every culture and historical period studied.

Kane Tanaka: The Most Recent Record Holder

Kane Tanaka was born on January 2, 1903 in Japan and died on April 19, 2022, at 119 years and 107 days. When she became the world's oldest living person in 2019, she was reportedly still sharp enough to do math calculations and enjoy board games, including Othello, which she played against care home staff. Her favorite foods were sushi and carbonated drinks. She was a practicing Catholic and credited her faith, along with family and the care staff at her nursing home, as central to her life. She had survived cancer twice and the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Supercentenarians: The Science of Extreme Longevity

A supercentenarian is defined as a person who has lived to age 110 or beyond. They are extraordinarily rare — at any given moment, there are only about 150–200 verified living supercentenarians worldwide, from a global population of 8 billion. The Gerontology Research Group and the International Database on Longevity maintain verified records.

What distinguishes supercentenarians from people who die at 85 or 90? Research points to both genetics and lifestyle. A landmark genomic study by Paola Sebastiani and colleagues at Boston University found that supercentenarians cluster into genetic groups with distinct signatures, particularly in genes related to immune function and lipid metabolism. They also appear to have unusually efficient cellular repair mechanisms and lower rates of the common diseases — cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes — that kill most people in their seventies and eighties. In many cases, supercentenarians do not die of age-related disease at all: they appear to simply exhaust the biological machinery at some fundamental level.

Blue Zones: Where Ordinary People Live Extraordinarily Long

Supercentenarians are extraordinary outliers, but the five "Blue Zones" identified by National Geographic journalist Dan Buettner represent geographic pockets where reaching your nineties in good health is common:

• Sardinia, Italy — particularly the Barbagia region, has the world's highest concentration of male centenarians.
• Okinawa, Japan — historically had the world's longest disability-free life expectancy, driven by diet, social structure, and the concept of ikigai (reason for being).
• Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica — men here have the lowest rate of middle-age mortality and the second-longest life expectancy in the world.
• Ikaria, Greece — residents have roughly 20% lower cancer rates, 50% lower heart disease rates, and almost no dementia compared to Americans.
• Loma Linda, California — Seventh-day Adventists here live 7–10 years longer than the average American, attributed to vegetarian diet, regular exercise, and strong social community.

What Supercentenarians and Blue Zone Residents Have in Common

Across these populations, several patterns appear consistently:

• Plant-dominant diets: Beans, legumes, and vegetables are dietary staples in every Blue Zone. Meat is consumed rarely, typically on special occasions.
• Natural movement: None of these populations engaged in structured gym workouts. They moved constantly as part of daily life — tending gardens, walking on hilly terrain, doing manual work.
• Sense of purpose: Okinawans call it ikigai; Nicoyans call it plan de vida. Having a clear reason to get up in the morning is consistently associated with lower mortality in longitudinal studies.
• Strong social connections: Blue Zone residents maintain close family ties, have active social lives, and belong to faith or community groups. Social isolation is as damaging to longevity as smoking 15 cigarettes per day, according to a 2015 meta-analysis.
• Low chronic stress: Each culture has built-in stress-reduction rituals — the Okinawan daily nap, the Sardinian afternoon rest, the Adventist Sabbath.
• Moderate caloric intake: Okinawans traditionally practiced hara hachi bu — stopping eating when 80% full — resulting in habitual caloric restriction without formal dieting.

The Role of Genetics vs Environment

Twin studies estimate that genetics accounts for roughly 25–30% of the variation in human lifespan. This means environment and behavior account for 70–75%. For most people, the genetic lottery matters less than the choices made across decades. The exception appears to be extreme longevity — living past 100 — where genetics plays a larger role. But the basic aspiration of living a long, healthy life to one's eighties and nineties appears to be well within the influence of modifiable factors for the vast majority of the population.

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