Scientists call them supercentenarians, people who are aged 110 or older. It’s estimated only a handful of such individuals remain in the world, who were born in another century, before the discovery of Penicillin or the invention of television. They even predate zippers.
In an article published this month in Genomic Psychiatry, Dr Mayana Zatz and colleagues from the Human Genome and Stem Cell Research Center, University of São Paulo, wrote Brazil’s incredible genetic diversity must be studied to unlock secrets of extreme longevity.
The way the country grew in diversity is unmatched. Colonisation by the Portuguese began in the early 1500s, then came the forced migration of nearly four million enslaved Africans in the 17th and 19th centuries, followed by waves of European and Japanese immigrants, all of whom contributed to the “richest genetic diversity in the world”, Dr Zatz’s paper said.
This diversity may have also bestowed Brazilians with certain ‘superpowers’.
When Dr Zatz and team set out to assemble a nationwide cohort of 100 centenarians, including 20 validated supercentenarians, they found several of them lucid and going about daily tasks on their own. Many were even found in areas with little healthcare access, suggesting lasting biological resilience that didn’t need medical interventions.
Among people they found was one Sister Inah, born in 1908 and till her death in April 2025, at age 116, the oldest living person. The team also found two very old men — one of them died last November while the other is still alive, aged 113.
The researchers found evidence of long lifespans clustering within families too. They found a 110-yearold woman with nieces who were 100, 104 and 106, making them part of one of the longest-lived families Brazil has ever known. The 106-year-old niece was competing in swimming championships till she was 100.
Longevity studies have so far largely focused on homogenous groups (elderly in Japan, for example), but the Brazilian team argued there’s much more to be learnt from diverse groups.
India has a number of centenarians — over 37,900 according to the World Population Review, which last year placed us fourth behind Japan (99,763), the US (73,629) and China (48,566).
It’s however unclear how many supercentenarians exist in the country; lack of birth registrations have prevented age-validation efforts, but at least three Indians over 110 have been validated through the years by the global non-profit, Gerontology Research Group.