These error rates cannot be ruled out by examining documents, the standard, because of successful pension fraud, identity theft, forgeries and errors that leave no documentary evidence. Age-coding error rates below 1 in 10,000 are sufficient to make artificial late-life plateaus, and errors below 1 in 100,000 can generate late-life mortality deceleration. However, this evidence depends on the existence of a late-life plateaus and deceleration that can be explained, in humans and other species, by the existence of very rare errors. This law was first quantified in 1939, when researchers found that the one-year probability of death at advanced age asymptotically approaches a limit of 44% for women and 54% for men. That is, there is no fixed upper limit to human longevity, or fixed maximal human lifespan. Studies in the biodemography of human longevity indicate a late-life mortality deceleration law: that death rates level off at advanced ages to a late-life mortality plateau. It has been proposed that no fixed theoretical limit to human longevity is apparent today. Although calorie restriction has not been proven to extend the maximum human life span as of 2014, results in ongoing primate studies have demonstrated that the assumptions derived from rodents are valid in primates. 'The progress being made in lengthening lifespans and postponing senescence is entirely due to medical and public-health efforts, rising standards of living, better education, healthier nutrition and more salubrious lifestyles.' Animal studies suggest that further lengthening of median human lifespan as well as maximum lifespan could be achieved through ' calorie restriction mimetic' drugs or by directly reducing food consumption. Reduction of infant mortality has accounted for most of the increased average life span longevity, but since the 1960s mortality rates among those over 80 years have decreased by about 1.5% per year. The longest living person whose dates of birth and death were verified according to the modern norms of Guinness World Records and the Gerontology Research Group was Jeanne Calment (1875–1997), a French woman who is verified to have lived to 122.

Main articles: Oldest people and List of the verified oldest people Demographic evidence Longevity refers only to the characteristics of the especially long lived members of a population, such as infirmities as they age or compression of morbidity, and not the specific life span of an individual. Mean life span varies with susceptibility to disease, accident, suicide and homicide, whereas maximum life span is determined by 'rate of aging'. Maximum life span contrasts with mean life span ( average life span, life expectancy), and longevity. Calculation of the maximum life span in the latter sense depends upon the initial sample size. By another definition, however, maximum life span corresponds to the age at which the oldest known member of a species or experimental group has died. In animal studies, maximum span is often taken to be the mean life span of the most long-lived 10% of a given cohort.

Animal age chart