World’s Oldest Person Dies at 116. Again.

Lifespans of the worlds “oldest people” suggest a limit on longevity

Sister Inah Canabarro Lucas didn’t quite make it to her 117th birthday. She died last week at the very ripe old age of 116 and 326 days. Lucas, a Brazilian nun, had become the world’s oldest person when Tomiko Itooka, a Japanese woman, died at 116.

Two humans have been documented as dying at age 119, one at 118, and eight at 117. Twenty have made it to age 116. Everyone else has died younger.

Except for Jeanne Calment of France, who died at age 122 in 1997.

All these numbers add up to an obvious conclusion: Lifespans (how long people can live) and life expectancy (how long people born in a given year can expect to live, on average) have not increased much in recent decades. In fact life expectancy has flatlined in the US at 78.4 years and is leveling off elsewhere (around 80 and above in most of Europe). And several longevity researchers think we’ve just about played all our cards in the game of longevity, at least in terms of the upper limit of what’s possible.

Average life expectancy still has headroom. But amid this data and all the anti-aging hype—the promise some futurists make about humans routinely living far longer than anyone has so far—is a largely overlooked fact:

The apparently large increases in life expectancy over the past century-plus are not as big as they seem.