Saul Newman traces supercentenarian records to pension fraud

Jiroemon Kimura, a Japanese man certified as the oldest ever recorded, died in 2013 at 116 years and 54 days. His papers carried two official birth dates, and elementary school records listed him as finishing in three different years — 1907, 1909 and 1911. Some records indicate he admitted during his lifetime to lying about his age.

Kimura is the anchor case in the work of Saul Justin Newman, a 41-year-old Australian researcher whose database of the world's claimed supercentenarians earned him the Ig Nobel Prize in Demography in 2024 and is now collected in the book 'Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science'. As a doctoral student Newman compiled the records and found that extreme age tracks the quality of local archives: the worse the paperwork, the older the inhabitants. Missing birth certificates, pension fraud and the dead who kept collecting pensions account for much of what the record books celebrate.

The mechanism is arithmetic rather than biological. If 100 forty-year-olds falsify documents to appear 50 among 100,000 genuine 50-year-olds, the falsifiers survive at a higher rate, for the uncomplicated reason that they are ten years younger. As a cohort ages, the liars make up an ever larger share of the living, until by age 100 they dominate what remains. Newman puts the share of Americans currently living with an inaccurate age at five to ten percent.

The celebrated 'blue zones' get the same audit. A National Geographic editor once briefed a reporter, in Newman's retelling, with the assignment: 'I need you to find me a Blue Zone in the United States.' The reporter located one in Loma Linda, a religious community on the road between his home and Las Vegas. The scientific evidence for blue zones is very low, Newman says, the conflicts of interest among those who study them very high — and whether the zones exist at all is, in his words, unknown.

The scrutiny now extends to the longevity industry, whose customers are people who already own nearly everything else. 'If you're Elon Musk and you've bought everything, the only thing left to sell is a way to escape death,' Newman told El País. Biomarkers that age backwards, with mortality never entering as an endpoint, are marketing rather than medicine in his account. What medicine demonstrably does — raising average lifespan and quality of life — happens to produce no world records.

An age is still verified the only way it ever was: someone reviews the documents and extends trust to everyone in the room. A quarter of the world's children still have no birth certificate.