Humans will continue to get older and older… and older.

There is no limit to how long people will live and there will be more “super centenarians” living to over 120, scientists have claimed.

Experts last year claimed humans would “only” reach the ripe old age of 115 years – with a few managing to wait until they were 125 to pop their clogs.

Research fellow Dr. Xiao Dong and colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York suggested human lifespan had peaked and a biological “barrier” reached.

But a new study by McGill University biologists argues that there is no evidence that maximum lifespan has stopped increasing and that the original study was flawed.

In fact, they believe super-centenarians will become more common as average life expectancy rises.

By analyzing the lifespan of the longest-living individuals from the US, the UK, France and Japan for each year since 1968, the McGill researchers found no evidence for such a limit, and if such a maximum exists, it has yet to be reached or identified.

Professor Dr. Siegfried Hekimi said: “Their claim rests on their identification of a plateau in the ages of maximum lifespan beginning around 1995 and close to 1997, which is the year that Jeanne Calment, a super centenarian with the longest confirmed human lifespan on record, died.

“We just don’t know what the age limit might be.

“In fact, by extending trend lines, we can show that maximum and average lifespans, could continue to increase far into the foreseeable future.”

He explained many are aware of what has happened with average lifespans.

For example in 1841 the average newborn male Brit could expect to live 40 years but a Brit born in 2011 could expect 79 years.

Today the life expectancy has jumped to around 81 years. But don’t start planning a lengthy retirement plan just yet.

Hekimi said it was impossible to predict what future lifespans in humans might look like.

Some scientists argue that technology, medical interventions and improvements in living conditions could all push back the upper limit. He said: “It’s hard to guess. Three hundred years ago, many people lived only short lives.

“If we would have told them that one day most humans might live up to 100, they would have said we were crazy.

“In conclusion, [previous studies] do not permit us to predict the trajectory that maximum lifespans will follow in the future, and hence provide no support for their central claim that the maximum lifespan of humans is ‘fixed and subject to natural constraints.’

“This is largely a product of the limited data available for analysis, owing to the challenges inherent in collecting and verifying the lifespans of extremely long-lived individuals.”

But responding to the new analysis in the journal Nature, Dong disagreed, claiming: “in the absence of solid statistical underpinning of various possible future scenarios, we feel that our interpretation of the data as pointing towards a limit to the human lifespan of about 115 years remains valid.”