Statistical curiosities of extreme aging

Last year at this time there was a minor controversy about whether the woman who is officially the oldest person ever had actually pulled off some sort of fraud. That question still seems somewhat open; what this post is about is the curious (to me anyway) trend, or apparent trend, toward the gradual extension of maximum human longevity.

(Note that all the following figures are constrained by the fact that good public health records have only existed for long enough to measure maximum longevity with some confidence since the mid-20th century).

Prior to 1983, there was no recorded instance of someone having reached the age of 114. (Indeed, the oldest known people in the world for the entire decade of the 1960s never reached 112). One person reached the age of 115 in the 1980s.

Since the 1990s, ten people have had a 117th birthday. What’s striking is that six of those ten people did so in the last five years. It seems that there’s been a pronounced trend over the past 70 years toward increased maximum lifespan.

A couple questions:

(1) To what extent is this just a statistical artifact of increasing population? (A bigger pool means more chances for extreme outliers).

(2) Does annual mortality risk more or less plateau at some point? (It increases continually through age 105, but after that the evidence is somewhat mixed). If it does, there would be no theoretical limit on human longevity. (Peter Thiel is reading this sentence as he quaffs some real sangria).

(3) Does anybody still read The Wasteland these days?

I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she answered: “I want to die.”

Petronius, Satyricon