A supercentenarian, sometimes hyphenated as super-centenarian, is a person who is 110 years or older. This age is achieved by about one in 1,000 centenarians. Supercentenarians typically live a life free of significant age-related diseases until shortly before the maximum human lifespan is reached.
Emiliano Mercado del Toro was a Puerto Rican supercentenarian and military veteran who was, at age 115, the world's oldest person following the death of 116-year-old Elizabeth Bolden on December 11, 2006, until his own death on January 24, 2007. He had already been the world's oldest man from November 19, 2004, upon the death of Fred Harold Hale. At the time of his death in January 2007, aged 115 years and 156 days, Mercado was the second oldest fully validated male ever, behind Danish-American Christian Mortensen's record of 115 years 252 days. Japanese man, Shigechiyo Izumi, was still believed to be older at the time of Mercado's death, but his record was withdrawn by Guinness World Records in 2010.
Longevity claims are unsubstantiated cases of asserted human longevity. Those asserting lifespans of 110 years or more are referred to as supercentenarians. Many have either no official verification or are backed only by partial evidence. Cases where longevity has been fully verified, according to modern standards of longevity research, are reflected in an established list of supercentenarians based on the work of organizations such as the Gerontology Research Group (GRG) or Guinness World Records. This article lists living claims greater than that of the oldest living person whose age has been independently verified, Japanese woman Tomiko Itooka, aged 116 years, 182 days, and deceased claims greater than that of the oldest person ever whose age has been verified, French woman Jeanne Calment, who died aged 122 years and 164 days. The upper limit for both lists is 130 years.
This is a list of tables of the oldest people in the world in ordinal ranks. To avoid including false or unconfirmed claims of old age, names here are restricted to those people whose ages have been validated by an international body dealing in longevity research, such as the Gerontology Research Group or Guinness World Records, and others who have otherwise been reliably sourced.
Leslie Stephen Coles was an American biogerontologist who was the co-founder and executive director of the Gerontology Research Group where he conducted research on supercentenarians and aging. He was also a visiting scholar in the computer science department at the University of California, Los Angeles and an assistant researcher in the Department of Surgery, at the David Geffen School of Medicine.
