Who are the oldest people ever to have lived, and what are their secrets to longevity? If you’re looking to live a long and healthy life, it may be good to examine the characteristics of centenarians to find the common threads. What are some centenarian secrets? We’ve taken a closer look at the top 100 verified oldest people in the world and some key aspects of their lives. We’ve also taken some tips from the top ten oldest people ever. Here’s what the oldest people on Earth have to tell us!

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A centenarian is a person who has lived a hundred years or more. Supercentenarians are those who survive past their 110th birthday — yes, like Bilbo Baggins, if he was a real person!

One out of every thousand centenarians lived to be a supercentenarian. The list of oldest people includes 663 validated cases of supercentenarians, living and dead, which may seem like a lot, but considering how many billions of people have existed, it’s not very many. The list of the oldest people in the world is short, and the list of verified world’s oldest people is even shorter. This top 100 list of the oldest people includes supercentenarians between the ages of 114 and 122, living and dead.

Who is the oldest person in the world who ever lived?

The verified oldest person ever was Jeanne Louise Calment, a French woman who lived in Arles to be a ripe age of 122 and gained fame during a celebration of the centennial of Vincent van Gogh’s visit to the town. She met van Gogh (who she later described as ugly and drunk), had German soldiers sleeping in her rooms in World War II, enjoyed killing wild boars in her spare time and survived her husband by 55 years. She was born in 1875 and died in 1997, having survived major technological changes in our world, from the advent of the telephone to the television and the Internet age. She was the oldest person to ever live in recorded history. Outside of a handful of supposedly possible and unconfirmed longevity myths (she once claimed to “compete with Methuselah”), she was the oldest human ever. So what did the longest-living person do to stay healthy? Eat chocolates, smoke cigarettes, and enjoy champagne!

How old is the oldest person alive right now?

Calment was the oldest person ever to live, but the oldest person alive currently lives on the other side of the globe: Nabi Tajima. She is 117 years old and the oldest person on Earth. A Japanese woman who doesn’t often give interviews, she recently surpassed Violet Brown of Jamaica, who lived through some very tough physical labor and died last year. Among the other oldest living people in the world are Chiyo Miyako of Japan, Giuseppina Projetto of Italy, and Kane Tanaka of Japan. The oldest people alive right now in the US are Delphine Gibson of Pennsylvania (114 years old) and Lessie Brown of Ohio (113 years old). But there are hundreds of living centenarians around the world, and many of them are still unverified.

What do centenarians have in common?

What can we learn from our elders? Advice from centenarians tends to be pretty simple, such as not worrying so much about the small stuff, sleeping soundly, enjoying hard work, having a family that makes you happy around you, or enjoying food. We can learn more by looking closer at their lives to find common characteristics in the list of centenarians. Japan and America, which have relatively good health care systems and less physical labor in the workforce, are the home countries of the most supercentenarians. The world’s oldest people tend to be female to a great extent, for many reasons. The most common birth month is August. Beyond these facts, what are the secrets from the statistics we can glean on their lifestyles? Some of these elders were famous for smoking most of their lives, eating bacon and grits, and enjoying foods supposedly horrible for you! Is it all genetics? Not exclusively, as avoiding obesity and keeping your brain sharp can certainly help. Perhaps someday we’ll discover the secrets to longevity and we’ll all live as long as Calment!