A Chechen great-great-grandmother born in 1881 could be the oldest woman in the world, Russian state television reported on Sunday, saying she pipped the current record holder by eight years.
Pasikhat Dzhukalayeva has nine grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren, and seven great-great-grandchildren who call her 'Granny Asi'.
"I do not know why I have lived so long. I have buried five brothers and sisters, and four children," the wrinkled Dzhukalayeva, who moves around in a wheelchair, told Rossiya television. She showed off a passport giving her year of birth.
If 122 as claimed, Dzhukalayeva would have been in her thirties during World War One and Russia's 1917 revolution, and already in her sixties when Soviet dictator Josef Stalin deported most of the Chechen people to Central Asia in 1944.
The most long-lived person with reliable documentation is believed to have been France's Jeanne-Louise Calment, who died at 122. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the world's oldest living woman is US citizen Charlotte Benkner, who was born in Germany in late 1889 - a mere 113 years ago.
According to Guinness, the oldest living man is Joan Riudavets Moll from Spain, who was born less than a month after Benkner in 1889, the year Adolf Hitler was born.
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