Brazilian Smoker May Be World’s Oldest Person

Oldest Man Smokes

All things considered, Jose Aguinelo dos Santos is a pretty  lively Brazilian man. He walks without a stick, has no known health problems, smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, and is still a childless bachelor, according to reports. Oh, and he might be 126 years old—the world’s oldest living person.

That’s the claim being made by Vila Vicentina, the home for the poor and indigent where dos Santos lives.

Home staffers say that one of their most lucid residents has documents suggesting that his birth date was July 7, 1888. Two months before his purported birth, Brazil was the last country in the western hemisphere to abolish slavery. He was an infant when the country still had an imperial family.

Photos of dos Santos’sdocumentation and details of his story were first published by the Brazilian news service G1 on Sunday. The son of freed Afro-Brazilian slaves, dos Santos may have been born on a slave compound that he still vividly remembers. He was one of six children living in a community of former slaves with no beds, according to staff at the Vila Vicentina. His life’s work was manual labor on a coffee plantation in the Sao Paolo town of Bauru.

Currently, the oldest verified living person is 116-year old Misao Okawa of Japan, according to the Gerontology Research Group, an international organization which tracks and verifies “Supercentenarians” — people who have lived to be older than 110. And dos Santos would be an outlier on the list for more than his notably advanced age. Only two of the 74 verified supercentenarians are men.

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