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Nevertheless, Zak provides evidence to show that Calment seemed to bear a closer resemblance to Yvonne than purported photos of herself as a young woman. It cites reports from witnesses, including a former mayor of Arles, saying that she looked and acted younger than her supposed age.

Zak also shows that Calment’s interviews with age verificators were replete with tiny inconsistencies, such as confusing her husband and father or saying that she was accompanied to school by a family maid who would actually have been 10 years her junior.

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Perhaps most notably, Calment had most of her personal papers destroyed rather than turning them over to the local Arles archive. “Intentional, remote destruction of photos and family archives after moving to the nursing home suggests that Jeanne had something to hide,” writes the paper, although it also acknowledges that destroying personal records is not out of the ordinary for centenarians who have outlived friends and family.

The imposter theory has been dismissed out of hand by Jean-Marie Robine, the French gerontologist who helped validate Calment’s extreme age in the 1990s. “All of this is incredibly shaky and rests on nothing,” he told Le Parisien.

Robine said that he and a colleague made sure to ask Calment questions that only she would know the answer to, such as the name of her mathematics teacher. “Her daughter couldn’t have known that,” he said.

Nicolas Brouard, a research director at France’s national institute for demographic studies, was more charitable with the research. Speaking to Agence France-Presse, he called Zak’s paper “very good work” and said the question could only truly be resolved via an exhumation of Jeanne and Yvonne Calment.