Famous longevity hotspots track poverty and weak records

Saul Newman, then at the University of Oxford, checked whether the places with the highest reported rates of extreme old age also had reliable birth and death records, and found almost the opposite pattern.

Newman found that the regions reporting the most people living to 100 or beyond were disproportionately poor, had the fewest birth certificates on record, and in some cases had unusually short average lifespans overall. Only about 18 percent of supercentenarian claims that had been exhaustively verified anywhere in the world actually had a birth certificate to confirm the age.

Pension fraud, where a family keeps collecting a deceased relative's payments by not reporting the death, and simple clerical error both appeared to inflate reported extreme-age populations in these regions. The work, which won a 2024 Ig Nobel Prize, does not prove every claim is false, but it shows that weak recordkeeping, not biology, explains a large share of the world's most celebrated longevity hotspots.

Weak records explain much of the hotspots.