At the ripe old age of 122 years and 164 days, Jeanne Calment entered the Guinness World Records as the world's oldest person ever. However, Russian researchers have thrown doubt on the claim, sensationally arguing that Jeanne actually died in 1934 and her daughter assumed her identity to avoid inheritance taxes. [...]
For one, they note that there is some disparity between her eye color, as well as her chin and forehead shape, from her 1930s passport portrait and photographs of her taken later in life. Many other photographs and family archives were seemingly destroyed after Calment was moved into a nursing home, which the researchers say "suggests that Jeanne had something to hide."
Stranger still, she frequently confused her husband with her father in interviews. When asked whether she knew the famous French writer Frédéric Mistral, she replied: “Yes! Yes, he was a friend of my father… um, he was a friend of my husband."
Perhaps that's just a symptom of a 122-year-old brain at work, but there is some harder scientific evidence to back up all this conjecture. At age 118, Calment underwent a series of cognitive function tests. The researchers reported that her performance was “comparable to that of persons with the same level of education in their eighties and nineties” – which is suspiciously close to the age her daughter would be.
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