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Myths and claims

Longevity myths are traditions about long-lived people (generally supercentenarians), either as individuals or groups of people, and practices that have been believed to confer longevity, but for which scientific evidence does not support the ages claimed or the reasons for the claims. A comparison and contrast of "longevity in antiquity" (such as the Sumerian King List, the genealogies of Genesis, and the Persian Shahnameh) with "longevity in historical times" (common-era cases through twentieth-century news reports) is elaborated in detail in Lucian Boia 's 2004 book Forever Young: A Cultural History of Longevity from Antiquity to the Present and other sources.

After the death of Juan Ponce de León, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés wrote in Historia General y Natural de las Indias (1535) that Ponce de León was looking for the waters of Bimini to cure his aging. Traditions that have been believed to confer greater human longevity also include alchemy, such as that attributed to Nicolas Flamel. In the modern era, the Okinawa diet has some reputation of linkage to exceptionally high ages.

Longevity claims may be subcategorized into four groups: "In late life, very old people often tend to advance their ages at the rate of about 17 years per decade.... Several celebrated super-centenarians (over 110 years) are believed to have been double lives (father and son, relations with the same names or successive bearers of a title).... A number of instances have been commercially sponsored, while a fourth category of recent claims are those made for political ends...." The estimate of 17 years per decade was corroborated by the 1901 and 1911 British censuses. Time magazine considered that, by the Soviet Union, longevity had been elevated to a state-supported "Methuselah cult".

Robert Ripley regularly reported supercentenarian claims in Ripley's Believe It or Not!, usually citing his own reputation as a fact-checker to claim reliability.