According to the residents of Brown Village in Himachal Pradesh, northern India, the old lady Dai Fudiwei who lives in this village is at least 130 years old. If her age can be confirmed, she will be the oldest person in the world, 14 years older than the oldest woman known in China.
Dinesh kumar, Chandigarh's lawyer, told the media a few days ago that Devi is at least 1 30 years old, even though she has no birth certificate. He said Devi gave birth to her eldest daughter at the age of 25, got married at the age of 20 and gave birth to her son Keshav Ram at the age of 28. Now Ram is 80 years old.
Kumar said that he began to investigate Devi's family history three months ago and there are two very important evidences to prove her age. First of all, one of her grandchildren is 80 years old. Secondly, one of her surviving sons 102 years old.
Devi's body is still strong, and he can go up the mountain to collect firewood by himself. She said that she drinks two cups of milk and eats a piece of millet bread every day, and she has only been to the hospital twice in her life. (Xinhua News Agency)
No one can live forever. Even if we find the secret of staying young and not aging, we will die of infectious diseases, murders, accidents and other reasons. Among people of different ages, the death rate of teenagers is the lowest. In developed countries, this figure is 0.05% per year. This means that even if we can be young forever, 0.05% of people will die every year for various reasons, only 95% will live to 100, and 50% will live to 1000.
On the other hand, aging is undoubtedly the most important factor leading to our death. It makes none of us live to the age of 1000, and only a few very lucky people can live to the age of1000. "When drinking songs, life geometry? For example, morning dew is much more difficult to go to Japan! "Cao Cao's eternal swan song can be transformed into an eternal problem: how old can people live? This question can be divided into three parts: what is the longest life span of human beings? What is the average life expectancy of human beings? What is the life expectancy of everyone?
Although people have been trying to calculate the longest life span that human beings can achieve, these calculations, whether based on superstition or science, are untenable. In fact, we have no reason to think that there is an upper age limit for living and dying. Natural selection cannot evolve such a "design". Although everyone will eventually die of aging, aging is a process of gradually wearing away the "machine" of life, and there is no upper limit gradually approaching. We can say for sure that no one can live to be a thousand years old or long, but we can't know exactly how old a person can live at most. For example, a car factory has launched a new car, and we know that it will eventually be scrapped if it is used all the time. We can also estimate its service life according to the original design, but unless we specially design a device, it will be scrapped automatically when it reaches its service life, otherwise there will definitely be some cars that can continue to be used after its service life. We can't infer their longest service life. The only way is to investigate the service life of all cars and find the one with the longest service life as the longest known service life of this car. The same is true of people's longest life. Theoretically, it is impossible to calculate, and the longest life span in history is taken as the longest life span known to mankind.
Who is the oldest person in history? You may immediately think of Peng Zu, the symbol of China's birthday girl. It is said that he was born in Xia Dynasty and was 800 years old by the end of Shang Dynasty. This is nonsense, of course. Official records, the so-called "official history" or the twenty-four histories, are more reliable. Ming metabolism made a statistic in the book "Five Miscellaneous Groups": "Life is only a hundred years old, and the number will be exhausted. So after 120, you won't die. This is called a demon that has been lost and recovered. However, Duke Dou of Han is 180 years old. Kim, 200 years old. /kloc-Luo jiye, 0/07 years old, lived in Cao Cao's life, brilliant and calm, until 120 years old died. Luoyang Li is 136 years old. 1 12-year-old Li Zhong Gu Siyuan eats both food and human beings. He has meat horns on his head. There are 240-year-old people in the city who no longer eat whole grains, but drink the milk of their great-grandchildren. Bird, a native of Shang Jin, Jingzhou, is now 1 16 years old. He is muscular and eats the same food. Fan Xianbei is a slave, 250 years old. ..... This is all recorded in the official history. " Among them, "Luoyang Li Shuangyuan" was mentioned by Bai Juyi, a great poet in the Tang Dynasty, in the Preface to Nine Old Pictures. He settled in Luoyang in his later years. At the age of 74, he organized a "Nine Old People Club" with eight old people, the oldest of whom was Li, 136 years old. According to these records, there are many people over the age of 120, and some even live to be over 200.
There are similar legends and records abroad. The Jewish Bible "Genesis" claims that before the flood, the life span of human beings was incredible, and the champion of longevity was Methuselah, who lived 969 years. This is nonsense, of course. Interestingly, Genesis, like the Five Miscellaneous Groups, also requires God to set the maximum life span of future generations at 120 years old ("The Lord said: since man is blood, my spirit will not live in him forever; However, his days can still have one hundred and twenty years. " )。 However, in the history of the west, there are also records of the number of years of living. The most famous is Thomas Parr, the oldest birthday girl in Britain. This is always a farmer in Shropshire, and his parish chronicle records that he was baptized in 1483. According to legal documents, he inherited his father's inheritance (a small farm) at 15 18. According to the marriage records, he got married for the first time on 1563. He was 80 years old and gave birth to a son and a daughter, both of whom died. /kloc-at the age of 0/00, he cheated on his wife and gave birth to an illegitimate child. He wore white clothes in church to atone for his sins. He got married for the second time after his wife died 10, at the age of 122. 1635, Earl Arenton heard about Parr's deeds when he visited Shropshire, and took him to London to meet King Charles I. At this time, Parr had been blind for 20 years, but he won the king's favor with his wit, was well treated and could draw pictures. Unfortunately, a few weeks later, he died on the spot while enjoying a grand palace banquet. Harvey, the discoverer of blood circulation and a physician, dissected his body and blamed his death on "acute indigestion caused by unaccustomed luxury diet". Charles I ordered Parr to be buried in Westminster Abbey, which was only used to bury kings and great men. This tomb still exists today. The epitaph says that he "lived for ten dynasties ... at the age of 152, and was buried here on 1635+065438+ 10/5."
But the biggest problem of these historical records is that there is no conclusive evidence to prove their accuracy and reliability. In the traditional society that respects the elderly, people tend to exaggerate their age intentionally or unintentionally, so their statements are questionable. For example, for Parr, we know the exact year of his death, and even his death certificate is still kept, but there is no reliable data to prove that he was indeed born in 1483. The most reliable birth record is the birth certificate, which only appears in modern times. We can confirm with conclusive documents that the champion of longevity in history is a French woman, Jeanne Louise Calment. Her birth certificate shows that she was born on February 2 1875. She sent away her husband (died in 1942), their only daughter (died in 1934) and their only grandson (died in 1963). 1965, a lawyer signed an agreement with her to give her $500 monthly living expenses in order to inherit the apartment she lived in after her death. The lawyer was only 47 years old, and she was 90 years old. For lawyers, this deal seems to be a good deal. Unfortunately, 30 years later, the lawyer died at the age of 77 after paying $65,438+084,000, which is more than twice the market price of the apartment. However, Mrs. Carmen is still alive. According to the agreement, the lawyer's family must continue to pay Mrs. Carmen's living expenses every month. At the age of 85, Mrs Carmen began to learn fencing. /kloc-When she was 0/00 years old, she was still riding a bike. 1/kloc-0 moved into a nursing home at the age of 0/0. 12 1 On her birthday, she released a record called Time Housewives, which is about recalling the past in the music background. At this time, she was blind, almost deaf and unable to leave the wheelchair, but she was still full of energy and normal intelligence. 1On August 4th, 997, she died in a nursing home at the age of 122 164 days. The oldest person is Japanese Quan Chiyo. He was born in Yixian Town, Tokushima Prefecture, Kagoshima Prefecture on June 29th, 1864, and died on February 26th, 1 986 at the age of 120 years and 237 days. He worked until 105.
After the death of Mrs Carmen, Mrs Maude Fealy-Luce, who was born in1887 65438+1October 2 1 USA, became the longevity champion. After her death on March 8, 2002, the title of longevity champion was transferred to Menzhen Kitahara, a woman from Kagoshima City, Japan. She was born in Yisong on September 8, 2002. The oldest male is Yukio Nakatomi, who lives in Gwangjun City, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan and was born on March 23rd, 1889. There are very few people who can live to be over 1 14 years old, and it is estimated that there is only one in every 2 1 100 million people. No one knows whether these people will live longer than Mrs. Carmen. We can only set the longest life span of human beings at 122 years old. However, this record will definitely be broken in the future, especially with the population expansion, more and more people participate in the longevity race, and with the improvement of medical and nutritional conditions, more and more people can live to a natural life, so the possibility of breaking the record is greatly increased.
No one can know how long a person can live. But we can use statistical methods to predict the average life expectancy of a certain population, which is called average life expectancy. If we want to know the life expectancy of a certain group of people, the most direct and accurate method is to calculate the average life expectancy after all their deaths. But this practice is unrealistic, because it means that we have to wait for more than a century to make statistics. In fact, demographers use an indirect, less accurate but much simpler statistical method. For many years, the governments of many countries have counted the number of births and deaths every year, as well as the age of the deceased. The census also counted the number of people still alive in each age group. Generally speaking, this information enables demographers to calculate the risk of death at each age and the probability of living to the next year. This survival probability constitutes a "life table", which shows the estimation of life expectancy of people of any age. This estimate is called "periodic life expectancy", which will change according to the statistical results of each year. In 200 1 year, the average life expectancy in China was 7 1.8 years, and198/kloc-0 was 67.77 years, an increase of 4 years. Before the founding of New China, the average life expectancy in China was only 35 years. According to World Population Prospects: Revised Edition in 2000 published by the United Nations Population Division, the average life expectancy in developed countries is 75 years, while that in developing countries is 63 years. This shows that China's average life expectancy is close to the level of developed countries, and some areas have exceeded the average level of developed countries. For example, according to the statistics of the Population and Employment Statistics Department of Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Statistics, the average life expectancy in Shanghai reached 78.77 years in 2000, including 76.7 1 year for men and 80.8 1 year for women.
The life expectancy of people of different ages constitutes a "life table". Life tables usually separate men from women and include three columns: average remaining years, average remaining days and the probability of living to the next birthday. According to the life table of American population in 2000, the average remaining life of boys and girls born in 2000, that is, the average life span from 2000 to death, is 73.5 years (26,000 days) and 79.6 days (29,000 days) respectively. If you were a 35-year-old American male in 2000, this table shows that, on average, you still have 14902 days (40.8 years) to live. Note that the average life expectancy is average, that is to say, for a 35-year-old man, about half will live more than 14902 days, while the other half will not live that many days. This table also tells you that the probability of living to 36 years old is 99.8%.
Careful observation of the probability of living to the next birthday in the life table shows that the probability of different age groups is different. The probability of children is the highest, which is maintained at around 99% before the age of 60, and then gradually decreases, and then drops sharply after the age of 90. 1 10 years old, the probability of living to the next birthday is less than half. This probability reflects the difference in mortality among people of all ages. This rule was first discovered by a British insurance statistician named Benjamin GunPelc in the19th century. From 65438 to 0825, when Gomez worked in an insurance company in England, he tried to find a simple method to estimate the mortality rate of all ages, which was obviously very important for life insurance. After collecting and counting the mortality rate in his area, he found an interesting rule: the infant mortality rate was high, and then decreased year by year until the mortality rate reached the lowest point when 10- 15 years old. After puberty, the mortality rate increases sharply, doubling every 10 years (that is, the probability of death at the age of 25 is twice that at the age of 15, at the age of 35 is twice that at the age of 25, and so on), and this trend continues until the age of 80. Gomez then investigated the mortality rates of Britain, France and Sweden in different historical periods and found the same pattern. So he thought he had discovered a natural law-"the law of death". Later, researchers found that this rule also applies to other animals: during sexual maturity, the mortality rate of animals reached the lowest point, and then began to increase exponentially. There are biological reasons behind Gomez's law. If harmful factors (such as pathogenic genes) are born in the body, natural selection works through reproduction.