ROME, Italy (AFP) — According to the US-based Gerontology Research Group (GRG), the world's oldest human is Jamaican Violet Brown, who was born on March 10, 1900.

Brown became the eldest person alive after the passing of Italian Emma Morano.

Read: Jamaica’s 'Aunt V', the world's oldest human

Morano, believed to have been the oldest person alive and the last survivor of the 19th century, died Saturday at the age of 117, Italian media reported.

Morano, born on November 29, 1899, died at her home in Verbania, in northern Italy, the report said.

"She had an extraordinary life, and we will always remember her strength to move forward in life," the mayor of Verbania was quoted as saying.

Morano's death means there is no one living known to have been born before 1900.

According to the report, her first love died in World War I, but she married later and left her violent husband just before the Second World War and shortly after the death in infancy of her only son.

She had clung to her independence, only taking on a full-time career a couple of years ago, though she had not left her small two-room apartment for 20 years.

She had been bed-bound during her later years.

In an interview with AFP last year, she put her longevity down to her diet.

"I eat two eggs a day, and that's it. And cookies. But I do not eat much because I have no teeth," she said in her home at the time, where the Guinness World Records certificate declaring her to be the oldest person alive held pride of place on a marble-topped chest-of-drawers.

Her dietary regime has intrigued the medical and scientific worlds.

The eldest of eight children, Morano outlived all of her younger siblings.