https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment
Resolves to my best guess taking into account all the available evidence in 2040, unless it seems at the time like more evidence will be coming out soon, in which case I'll delay resolution.
Update 2025-02-26 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): - Exact Match Requirement: The longevity record must match exactly 122 years and 164 days.
No Tolerance for Error: Any deviation—by even a few days or weeks—will result in a resolution of no.
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Where the evidence sits, for a resolver who wants the exact 122 years 164 days. The switch hypothesis (Zak and Novoselov, 2018; Zak, Rejuvenation Research 2019) is that Jeanne died in 1934 and her daughter Yvonne took her identity to avoid inheritance tax. The validators' reply (Robine, Allard, Herrmann and Jeune, Journals of Gerontology A, 2019) went back to the original validation file and added newly found documents, concluding there was neither tax fraud nor a swapped identity, with the demographers' usual point that one 122 at the tail of a few million French women born in the 1870s is improbable but not impossible. Nothing of substance has been published since, and the DNA route (living relatives, archived samples) has not been taken, so by 2040 the file will most likely be what it is today, and the exact-match clause makes this a bet on the documents rather than on new evidence. On the documents, the 2019 paper is the stronger side; 39% prices the switch at more than the people who have read the file put on it. For scale, the mortality data above 105 are flat at roughly 50% a year (Barbi et al., Science 2018), which makes 122 rare but not a statistical impossibility, and makes a second 122 within our lifetimes about as unlikely as the first.
@IsaacKing Betting on NO then, since I don't think it's likely that any new evidence would come out in the next 15 years.
The New Yorker article presents the arguments but make a strong case against the fraud.
I especially like this part : << One of them, Gilberte Mery, whose grandfather was Jeanne’s first cousin, told Le Journal du Dimanche that the switch theory was “completely idiotic.” Recalling the Arles tradition of promenades, she said, “We looked at who walked with whom, we noticed if someone changed her dress. Can you imagine if, all of a sudden, people no longer saw Aunt Jeanne but Yvonne?” >>