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| The new article insists that Calment's identity "has not been usurped" (AFP Photo/GEORGES GOBET) |
Paris (AFP) - Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died two decades ago aged 122, should retain the title of the oldest person on record, French researchers said Monday, rejecting claims of fraud.
Ageing
specialists Jean-Marie Robine and Michel Allard, who declared Calment the
longest-lived person in the 1990s, said their review of old and new data
confirmed she "remains the oldest human whose age is
well-documented".
"Recently
the claim that families Calment and Billot (her in-laws) organised a conspiracy
concerning tax fraud based on identity fraud between mother and daughter gained
international media attention," Robine, Allard and two other researchers
wrote in The Journals of Gerontology.
"Here,
we reference the original components of the validation as well as additional
documentation to address various claims of the conspiracy theory and provide
evidence for why these claims are based on inaccurate facts," they wrote.
Calment,
who used to joke that God must have forgotten her, died in southern France in
1997, setting a longevity record that has been questioned.
Last
December, Russian researchers Valery Novoselov and Nikolay Zak claimed in a
report that Calment had actually died in 1934 and that her daughter Yvonne
stole her identity to avoid paying inheritance tax.
According
to their research, the woman who died in 1997 was Yvonne, not her mother, and
at a young 99.
The Russian
repoprt was based on biographies, interviews and photos of Jeanne Calment,
witness testimony, and public records of the city of Arles where she lived.
 |
The new
article insists that Calment's identity "has not
been usurped" (AFP
Photo/GEORGES GOBET)
|
Meeting
Van Gogh
The new
article insists Calment's identity "has not been usurped", according
to a statement from the French research institute INSERM, where Robine works as
research director.
The authors
cross-checked the original data used to validate the centenarian's identity
with newly uncovered documents, to show "there was neither tax fraud nor
falsification of Jeanne Calment's identity" the article says.
The team
also turned to mathematical modelling to counter arguments that her
considerable age was impossible.
In every 10
million centenarians, one can reach the age of 123, they said, "a
probability that is certainly small, but that is far from making Ms Calment a
statistical impossibility."
"All
the documents uncovered contradict the Russian thesis," Robine told AFP,
as the team demanded a retraction from Zak and Novoselov.
Novoselov,
however, insisted Monday that the original work verifying Calment's identity
and age "is full of flaws and mistakes", while Zak said he found the
new article "weak".
Born on
February 21, Calment became the biggest attraction of the southern French city
of Arles since Vincent Van Gogh, who spent a year there in 1888.
She said
she had met the artist when he came to her uncle's store to buy paints, and
remembered him as "ugly as sin" and having an "awful
character".
Calment
used to talk of enjoying chocolate and port and would smoke an occasional
cigarette before her health deteriorated.
INSERM said
however that it could not "support any requests for exhumation" of
Calment's body, on which no autopsy was performed after her death.
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