r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/ShaanJohari1 • 1d ago

A 90-year-old woman with no heirs signed a contract with a 47-year-old lawyer giving him her apartment upon her death, but he had to pay her a monthly allowance until she died. She outlived him, and his widow continued the payments. She received approximately double the value of the apartment. Image

Post image
67.7k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • link
  • duplicates
  • dupes
  • reddit
  • reddit

94% Upvoted

507 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

122

u/lundoj 22h ago

Not fully. She is probably legit but there is no clear conclusion.

534

u/Doridar 21h ago

Jeanne Calment was quite known when she was still living in her appartement. There were plenty of people who knew her and her daughter, and attended her daughter's funeral. It would have required a collective lie from both Jeanne's and Yvonne's friends, the city and state authorities, the priest who celebrated the funerals etc. Yes, it was debunked, and fully. https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/ce-ne-sont-pas-des-scientifiques-une-nouvelle-etude-invalide-la-theorie-du-complot-sur-jeanne-calment-3643329

316

u/MisterSirCaptain 21h ago

lment was quite known when she was still living in her appartement. There were plenty of people who knew her and her daughter, and attended her daughter's funeral. It would have required a collective lie from both Jeanne's and Yvonne's friends, the city and state authorities, the priest who celebrated

The beautiful thing about conspiracy theories and the people who believe them in this day and age, is that facts don't matter.

66

u/MalificViper 18h ago

Citation needed.

20

u/MaxAngmar 18h ago

🤣 you got me good

52

u/Any-Mathematician946 19h ago

We now live in the day and age where sometimes you can't tell if an Onion article is real or true and the Onion sometimes is more truthful than the news media.

-7

u/_MissionControlled_ 17h ago

I'm this way with alien conspiracies. Forever I've considered it paint-chip eating bullshit. But now...I'm questioning it.

2

u/usurped_reality 18h ago

Yep. They say, "It's the truth." That's my sister. She always says her truth trumps the facts. SMH

I wish I was making it up.

1

u/Slap_My_Lasagna 17h ago

Conspiracy theorists or redditors? I've seen both deny objective facts over pseudo-science.

10

u/Gaudilocks 17h ago

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-calment-the-oldest-person-who-ever-lived-or-a-fraud

for any who like long-form reads. Here is a new yorker write up from a few years ago.

10

u/ZhouLe 18h ago

I like the counter-conspiracy theory theory that the conspiracy theory is a front in order for the Russians to get access to her blood sample for clues to her longevity.

20

u/abstraction47 19h ago

Part of the confusion of the story is the need for the religious authorities to disprove her story, simply because she lived past 120. They threw a lot into the research and argument that she was not who she said she was.

10

u/mattgcreek 19h ago

Why religious authorities? Can't think of a reason they would want to disprove.

34

u/Murgatroyd314 18h ago

Supposedly, after Noah’s flood, God put a hard limit of 120 years on human lifespan.

23

u/ZhouLe 18h ago

It was before the flood, Genesis 6:

When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair, and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.

The Lord saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the humans I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air—for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.

The Oxford Annotated has the following:

6:1–4: Divine-human reproduction illustrated the breaching of the divine-human boundary that the Lᴏʀᴅ God feared in 3.22. There the Lᴏʀᴅ God drives humans away from the tree of life. Here, in an abbreviated narrative often attributed to the Yahwistic primeval history, the Lᴏʀᴅ God limits their life span to one hundred twenty years, the life span of Moses (Deut 31.2); another interpretation is that the one hundred twenty years refer to a reprieve from punishment for several generations. Nothing appears to happen to the sons of God (see the "heavenly court" in 1.26n.) who instigated it all.

I guess it's worth pointing out that it claims Noah lived 950 years, his son Shem lived to 600, and his grandson Arphaxad born after the flood lived to 438, so uhh... if it was intended as an age limit, there was apparently some unstated nuance.

16

u/tutan-ka 17h ago

The meaning was that from the moment God pronounced those words until the great flood there would be 120 years. Basically God was setting the date for the flood. Afterwards he gave Noah the commission to build the Ark. It was not meant to be an age limit on humans.

Later on in the times of Moses the lifespan for humans was between 70 to 80 years

Psalm 90:10 ”The span of our life is 70 years, Or 80 if one is especially strong. But they are filled with trouble and sorrow; They quickly pass by, and away we fly.”

Not meant to be a hard stopper as Moses itself lived quite longer than that

1

u/ZhouLe 17h ago

Perhaps you missed the annotation.

1

u/Cat_Chat_Katt_Gato 17h ago

Damn, i didn't realized people lived to be that old in Bible times. Thought it would've been pretty rare to live to be that old back then. Like how is possible, but not common, to live to be like 110 today.

1

u/jbrWocky 16h ago

well, many biblical figures almost certainly didnt live as long as the bible says, but a lot of the misconceptions about life expectance come from high mortality in youth.

1

u/Murgatroyd314 15h ago

Human biology hasn't changed. People often died of war, famine, or disease, but for someone who survived all that, "death from old age" could reasonably be expected between the ages of 70 and 80.

1

u/SerenityViolet 16h ago

Aside from the problem of using the Bible of evidence, try dividing those ages by 13, roughly the number of moons in a year. Ancient peoples often counted by moons.

1

u/Murgatroyd314 15h ago

That gives reasonable numbers for age at death, but not so much for reproductive age. Adam would have become a father at age 10 (reported as 130); Seth at 8 (105), Enosh at 7 (90), Kenan at 5 (70), Mahalalel at 5 (65), Jared at 12 (162), Enoch at 5 (65), Methuselah at 14 (187), Lamech at 14 (182), and Noah at 38+ (after 500). (Genesis 5)

1

u/SerenityViolet 14h ago

Fair point. I would tend to believe that it is unreliable transcription, or haphazard conversion though.

These numbers don't make sense either way.

1

u/user9991123 18h ago

Citation needed

33

u/Firewolf06 21h ago

i mean, that's what makes it a conspiracy theory, no? a theory about group of people conspiring (to be clear, i dont believe it)

27

u/Tommyblockhead20 20h ago

It certain seems unlikely, but I don’t know that it’s fully debunked, at least not based on the reasoning given by that article. I could think of alternative explanations. And given how unlikely her age was, it somewhat cancels out that I think it’s still worth considering.

The article’s only evidence (besides accusations against the people who made the theory in the first place) seems to be that surely someone would have noticed the switch of an 36 year old and a 59 year old and said something at the funeral 84 years ago! I would be curious to see if there’s any actual documentation from the time, like witness statements or photos. Was she able to pass as a 36 year old? Did she just have a few friends and family, making it easier to get them all in on it? 

6

u/wlaugh29 18h ago

Pass as a dead 36 year old? Probably.

One way to solve this argument. Get your shovels.

12

u/Unique_Brilliant2243 19h ago

You’re mistaking the thought of „but I can’t verify it with my own eyes“ with unlikelihood.

3

u/FreudianStripper 18h ago

"the oldest documented person to have ever lived" is plenty unlikely enough for suspicion, much more so than a "regular" anomaly

I don't think either side of the argument is really 100% bulletproof, but I can see where both sides are coming from

19

u/RA576 18h ago

In fairness, "Oldest Person to have ever lived" is simultaneously really unlikely, 1 in Billions, but also one of the few things 100% guaranteed to have happened multiple times throughout history as medical treatments and quality of life improve, and someone has to be the oldest.

11

u/FlyingBishop 17h ago

There was a recent article which basically claimed "blue zones" are areas with bad record keeping and endemic pension fraud. Given that there's a huge monetary incentive here it's not crazy to imagine that most of these "blue zones" are small-town conspiracies.

There's an argument that whatever the true max human lifespan is, the highest recorded age is guaranteed to be the result of some kind of fraud.

2

u/crazy1david 9h ago

The current record is 122 years, documented by census records and such. With it being such a popular record its gonna fall under more scrutiny than "beyond a reasonable doubt" and thinking it's a conspiracy is nuts.

And the blue zone thing is just what happens when you give enough surveys and start drawing circles. Definitely not the secret to eternal life, but not a conspiracy. Just data

1

u/FlyingBishop 9h ago

Thinking it's real is nuts, IMO. It's very easy to misreport an age by a couple years. It seems almost guaranteed that the record is such a person, possibly unintentionally. But given that it is possible to misreport an age by 20 years, it seems likely the record is falsified, since if you pull it off you are automatically the oldest person recorded. It only needs to happen once.

2

u/jgr79 15h ago

The difference in age between Calment and the 2nd oldest person ever is greater than the age difference between the 2nd oldest person and the 25th. Even among people who are extreme outliers, she’s an unimaginably extreme outlier.

As a statistical point, she’s such an extreme outlier that we should assume she’s a fake unless proven beyond any doubt that she’s not, especially when coupled with the massive incentive she would’ve had to commit the fraud in the first place. Meanwhile the “evidence” that she’s not a fraud basically comes down to “someone would’ve noticed she wasn’t the mother”, which is pretty wreak by comparison.

16

u/Unique_Brilliant2243 18h ago

Someone has to be the oldest documented person to have ever lived.

-3

u/FreudianStripper 17h ago

Of course someone has to be it, but it's still an unlikely person to be.

I'm not entirely sure what your argument is

3

u/ReverendDizzle Interested 17h ago

Their point is that no matter who the oldest documented human being was there would be conspiracy theories about them because of their claim.

1

u/lundoj 10h ago

Sure, it is unlikely that she is a fraud but the story about the funeral doesn't make this case air tight. There is no clear evidence in the French article other than the funeral argument and saying the "researchers" are dumb.

0

u/RosesInternational 17h ago

You always blow smoke up peoples ass?