Top 10 Oldest People Ever (Verified Records)

Jeanne Calment is a legend. She was born in 1875, before the Eiffel Tower was built, and died in 1997. She once claimed to have met Vincent van Gogh in her uncle's paint shop, but found him a dirty, unpleasant man.

Guinness World Records recognizes her as the undisputed record holder, despite some conspiracy theories claiming her daughter had taken over her identity (which experts have refuted). She smoked until she was 117 and ate a kilo of chocolate a week.

Until her death in 2022, Kane Tanaka was the oldest living person. She loved fizzy drinks and board games. Her life spanned no fewer than five Japanese imperial eras. She lived in a nursing home where she was known for her sharp mind; she often got up early to do math problems to keep her brain active.

Sarah Knauss is the oldest person ever to have lived in America. She died just 33 hours before the year 2000 began. Had she made it, she would have lived in three different centuries. She was a calm woman who, according to her family, owed her long life to the fact that she never worried about anything. Where Calment was a celebrity, Knauss preferred to live in anonymity.

Sister André was a French nun who devoted her life to caring for others. She still worked in a hospital until she was 108. In 2021 she made world news because, just before her 117th birthday, she survived Covid-19 without symptoms, becoming the oldest survivor of the pandemic. She drank a glass of wine every day and enjoyed chocolate.

Nabi Tajima lived on a small island in the south of Japan. When she died in 2018, she was the very last person on Earth born in the 19th century (1900 or earlier). She had a gigantic family: more than 160 descendants, including great-great-great-grandchildren she was able to hold.

The oldest Canadian ever came from Quebec. It is often thought that you need to live extremely healthily to get this old, but Marie-Louise smoked tobacco until she was 90. According to her, the secret to her long life was simple: hard work and never eating meat, although her family sometimes contradicted that last part.

“Aunt V” was Jamaica's first supercentenarian. She was born when Jamaica was still under the rule of Queen Victoria, making her officially the last living subject of the Victorian era. She attributed her long life to her faith and her diet of local produce like fish and mutton, and she avoided pork and chicken.

Maria was born in San Francisco but moved to Catalonia as a child. She is a special case because she actively took part in scientific research. Doctors studied her DNA to understand why she was still in such good physical and mental shape at that age. She was also very active on Twitter (with her daughter's help) to share her wisdom.

Emma Morano had a very unusual diet. After a doctor told her in 1919 that she was anemic, she started eating three eggs a day, two of them raw. She kept that up for almost a century. She had also been single since 1938 (after throwing her violent husband out of the house) and often claimed that her independence was the reason she lived so long.

Another Japanese woman on the list. Chiyo Miyako was called “the goddess” by her family because she was so talkative and kind. She loved calligraphy (Japanese artistic writing), which she kept practicing until a very old age. Her favorite food was sushi, especially eel.