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14th October 2025
12:13pm BST
The average lifespan has increased massively over the last century.
So much so, that if you're a Brit, you can expect to live to 81.24 years, on average.
However, what is the oldest that humans could live to, in a perfect world?
A study conducted by Dutch scientists at Tilburg and Rotterdam's Erasmus universities has found the maximum age that humans should be able to live to
They arrived at the conclusion that the maximum age a man can reach is 114.1 years, with a woman having the ability to live a little over a year longer with a maximum age of 115.7 years.
While it can be nigh on impossible to determine a ‘maximum age’ for human beings, the team of scientists certainly can’t be accused of a lack of thoroughness when reaching their findings.
Data from over 75,000 people over a 20-year period was used to arrive at the figures quoted above, and while one of the scientists involved, Professor John Einmahl, agreed that while average life expectancy will increase over time, that the maximum age of humans hasn’t changed significantly in the last three decades.
"On average, people live longer, but the very oldest among us have not gotten older over the last 30 years," Einmahl said.
"There is certainly some kind of a wall here.
"Of course the average life expectancy has increased,” Einmahl added.
"Nevertheless, the maximum ceiling hasn't changed."
While the figure of 115.7 years as the maximum age for women is almost the same as the figure arrived at in a similar study in the United States recently, it falls significantly short of the age reached by Jeanne Louise Calment, a French woman who died at the age of 122 years and 164 days and is believed to be the oldest person ever to have lived.
The world's current oldest person is a woman called Ethel Caterham from Hampshire, who has reached the age of 116 years and 54 days. She is the oldest British person in recorded history, and the only surviving individual who was born in the first decade of the 1900s.
