Nobody Believes Recently Deceased Georgian Woman Lived for a Mind-Frying 132 Years

The purported oldest woman in the world has died and the only question anyone seems capable of asking is, “Yeah, but was she really 132? That seems made up.” Antisa Khvichava, hailing from Georgia (as in, the country of) claimed to have been born on July 8, 1880, which would mean that she was 31-years-old when the Titanic sunk, 37 during Russia’s October Revolution, 61 when the Soviet Union entered the Second World War, and just a year old when Fyodor Dostoyevsky died. That’s a crazy amount of modern history to live through, and though Khvichava had a Soviet-era passport documenting her 19th century birthday, experts are skeptical because…c’mon, right? 132? That’s biblical!

The Soviet-era passport was created after Khvichava’s original birth documents were lost, so it’s unlikely anyone will ever be able to verify her real age. Local officials, friends, neighbors, and family members have all vouched for Khvichava’s claim, but her age has never officially been proven. If you want to believe that the world just lost the oldest human ever, then all eyes should turn to (not all at once, jeez!) 116-year-old Besse Cooper from Georgia (as in, the State of), currently the oldest person around. She was born in 1896, when airplanes were still a terrible affront to nature and the Ottoman Empire was just starting to come down with a cold. The oldest verified human ever was a French woman named Jeanne Calment, who made it all the way to 122 and claimed to have canoodled with Vincent Van Gogh when she was a spritely young woman.

Was she really 132? World’s ‘oldest person ever’ Antisa Khvichava dies in remote Georgian village [The Independent]