To be fair Greenland sharks reach sexual maturity at 150 years old. So you know, their awkward teen years are probably longer too. Just imagine having to listening to angsty rock music for 80 years
At 190, he was born in 1832. Some of the oldest photographs of anything are from the late 1830's. If you stretch your definition of photography, you could argue the oldest photos are from the 1820s. But for most intents and purposes, this tortoise is older than all photographs in the world, of anything, ever.
While Jonathan was alive Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, Samuel Morse received the patent for the telegraph, Beau Brummell died and Oliver Wendell Holmes was born. Jonathan is older than Canada and Hong Kong.
I would slightly correct the statement in the article: "The World’s Oldest [Known] Land Animal Ever". But after reading through it, I'm afraid that animals living in the wild (which are not fed and cared for) probably wouldn't reach this age, so the statement may actually be correct...
It's the oldest known land animal in modern times.
For example, a tortoise could have lived a couple thousand years ago and lived a couple hundred years. The people of that time may have known about it over the generations. Yet, we today have no record.
"ever" is said a lot but it's hard to substantiate.
The Testudine lineage is more than 200 million years old.
I'm confident that some tortoise, somewhere, lived in isolated splendour longer than Jonathan. It's just a numbers game, holding 190 up against 200 million and squinting a bit.
Not to take anything away from the old fellow! He's earned his laurels.
I wonder if their long lifespan is an adaptation to take advantage of some extremely rare event that benefits their reproduction.
For example, perhaps their eggs are usually eaten by a kind of crab. But once every 50 years there is a a massive hurricane that decimates the crab population. In the following spawning season, nearly all of the eggs hatch. The 150 year lifespan allows them to participate in 2-3 of these rare spawning seasons.
Since the event is rare, scientists get few chances to notice it.
I think they can do simulation and then map result against actual observations. This would be very similar to "climate science" now (albeit at a smaller scale) where a lot of conclusions are done via projections of years in advances within their simulated earths.
With the life+70 system we have now, it would be physically impossible for photos taken today to go public domain before said person dies. "Works for hire", OTOH, are 95 years from publication or 120 from creation (whichever expires first). With those, it is theoretically possible that a photo of a toddler would go public domain before they die.
The photographer and not the subject is the owner of the copyright. So life+70 it would be with regards to the photographer. So if a grandparent photographed their baby grandchild and died shortly afterward, when the grandchild was in their 70’s the photo would enter the public domain.
I've heard a theory that the first person to reach 150 will also be the first person to live to 1000, because they'll be around for an extra 50 years of anti-aging research, which will buy them more time, and so on.
We do seem to have a hard cap of around 120 which
basically hasn't moved - we are just bringing the averages closer to it. I'm optimistic we'll go past it but not without some advances on a different level of everything so far.
> but we’ll need to do a bit of research to get us to 150, for instance
Indeed, but we could additionally to research also do something against the most common causes of (early) death - the more people live longer, the higher the chance is that one of those who has not suffered a preventable death is the one that lives to be 150 years.
And there's a lot that we can easily tackle at relatively low cost compared to the gains (both in productivity and years-lived): incentivize people to quit or reduce alcohol and tobacco consumption, make high quality food affordable and accessible to everyone (=combat "food deserts"), reduce working hours in a first step towards 40 hours and then 30 or even 20 hours, reduce commute times, mandate vaccinations for everything that Army soldiers get across the population, increase access to cancer awareness programs and to first-class physical and mental healthcare so that cancer and other illnesses can get detected and treated early enough...
Tortoises (and greenland sharks) are cold-blooded, living life in the slow lane, which makes things much easier. Hummingbirds OTOH, have an insane longevity metabolism pairing. My bet is that bats, parrots and naked mole rats probably have more to teach us about longevity than tortoises.
Someone once told me that the finite human lifetime is not a constraint of physics or biology, but evolution. The fact that older organisms decay and die gives an opportunity for new organisms (potentially, with superior genes) to thrive.
If there was no finite lifetime, then the benefit of physical maturity would allow older organisms to perpetually outcompete the younger ones, reducing the rate of genetic adaptation and the fitness of species overall.
Does anyone with specific knowledge know if this is true? If so, it's a little bit depressing to think that aging is simply a programmed biological process, "deliberately" degrading our bodies on a schedule and killing us off to make room for something new, rather than any sort of fundamental limitation of the underlying system.
I've read it's not so much that a particular aging trajectory is selected for, it's that mechanisms that shorten lifespan aren't selected against depending on ecology, social structure, and so forth. I imagine that's not entirely accurate, though, as there are some species that have definite senescence patterns that are closely tied to important developmental events (e.g., octopuses and egg laying).
It's difficult for me to imagine something that selects for individual death per se, but I can imagine certain cellular repair mechanisms and so forth, with death at a certain age being a secondary consequence, being selected for depending on a host of factors. Evolution tends to be somewhat chaotic in that what's adaptive depends on prior evolutionary history to some extent.
I mean during a long period humans were probably mainly dying of other things than old age? Wisdom and skill transfer must have had huge importance, but the chance of reaching 200 years of age must have been miniscule for a long part of our race's time on earth even if they could live that long.
On the other hand it means that there are some benefits which are correlated with age or else this mechanism wouldn’t be necessary.
Our culture mostly looks on old age with disdain. And indeed not just old age but any kind of aging past 25. And to be sure there are many objective downsides to being old compared to young. However one does also have the opportunity to attain knowledge and wisdom as one gets older. And that can continue until one starts to become senile, which might only start in very advanced years for many or most people!
Even though they're more athletic in their early twenties, most basketball players seem to peak around 27-29, I assume because of the intersection of athleticism and skill gained from experience.
If very process of sexual reproduction that brought humans into existence is entangled with the process of aging, there is probably no reason to think that humans (or any species that reproduces sexually) could somehow change or evolve to become immortal.
Meanwhile, this shark has been swimming around the Atlantic since 1627:
https://www.captain-planet.net/uploads/2018/10/67241603_3621...
~~Kids~~ Tortoises these days...
https://www.captain-planet.net/400-year-old-shark-found-in-t...
"These sharks have an estimated lifespan of 400 years and they spend their time swimming around looking for mates."
I will not complain about my own 50 year search, then.
"looking for mates" is nautical language; when first or second mates are unavailable, they will eat the usually older captains, too.
To be fair Greenland sharks reach sexual maturity at 150 years old. So you know, their awkward teen years are probably longer too. Just imagine having to listening to angsty rock music for 80 years
Without reading the article my guess is it's a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark#Longevity
They're estimated to live between 250 and 500 years.
Not necessarily. We had explained here yet why this age value is just an estimate that can miss for a mile.
At 190, he was born in 1832. Some of the oldest photographs of anything are from the late 1830's. If you stretch your definition of photography, you could argue the oldest photos are from the 1820s. But for most intents and purposes, this tortoise is older than all photographs in the world, of anything, ever.
Note that the photo is from when it arrived in St Helena in 1886, not when it was presumed to have been born in 1832.
However your point that it is older than photo technology stands.
While Jonathan was alive Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, Samuel Morse received the patent for the telegraph, Beau Brummell died and Oliver Wendell Holmes was born. Jonathan is older than Canada and Hong Kong.
To paraphrase a meme that went around a few years ago, "Jonathon was alive during slavery, and did nothing!"
Be fair - Jonathan never owned a slave! His conscience is clear.
From the description, it seems he's spent a life eating lettuces and bonking. Not a bad 190 years.
I would slightly correct the statement in the article: "The World’s Oldest [Known] Land Animal Ever". But after reading through it, I'm afraid that animals living in the wild (which are not fed and cared for) probably wouldn't reach this age, so the statement may actually be correct...
It's the oldest known land animal in modern times.
For example, a tortoise could have lived a couple thousand years ago and lived a couple hundred years. The people of that time may have known about it over the generations. Yet, we today have no record.
"ever" is said a lot but it's hard to substantiate.
"That we know of" is implicit.
10 replies →
The Testudine lineage is more than 200 million years old.
I'm confident that some tortoise, somewhere, lived in isolated splendour longer than Jonathan. It's just a numbers game, holding 190 up against 200 million and squinting a bit.
Not to take anything away from the old fellow! He's earned his laurels.
They even mentioned a 250 y.o. (nwow dead) Tortoise in the article
2 replies →
I wonder if their long lifespan is an adaptation to take advantage of some extremely rare event that benefits their reproduction.
For example, perhaps their eggs are usually eaten by a kind of crab. But once every 50 years there is a a massive hurricane that decimates the crab population. In the following spawning season, nearly all of the eggs hatch. The 150 year lifespan allows them to participate in 2-3 of these rare spawning seasons.
Since the event is rare, scientists get few chances to notice it.
I think they can do simulation and then map result against actual observations. This would be very similar to "climate science" now (albeit at a smaller scale) where a lot of conclusions are done via projections of years in advances within their simulated earths.
Imagine living so long you have photographs of yourself whose copyright terms expired. Would Wikipedia be allowed to use those without permission?
With the life+70 system we have now, it would be physically impossible for photos taken today to go public domain before said person dies. "Works for hire", OTOH, are 95 years from publication or 120 from creation (whichever expires first). With those, it is theoretically possible that a photo of a toddler would go public domain before they die.
The photographer and not the subject is the owner of the copyright. So life+70 it would be with regards to the photographer. So if a grandparent photographed their baby grandchild and died shortly afterward, when the grandchild was in their 70’s the photo would enter the public domain.
2 replies →
I guess one could always try to sue to get your embarrassing baby photos redacted from publication. Oh, it's been tried before and failed? Nevermind.
Yes, that's rather much the point of copyright expiration.
Has any research been produced around animals in general that live this long? IE: what about their genetics/life encourages this longevity?
Humans seem to have a lifespan of around 100. 2000 years ago people lived into their 90’s, and a few even made it to 100.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...
Modern medicine should be able to get more people into their 90’s but we’ll need to do a bit of research to get us to 150, for instance.
I've heard a theory that the first person to reach 150 will also be the first person to live to 1000, because they'll be around for an extra 50 years of anti-aging research, which will buy them more time, and so on.
It was from an anti aging TED talk I believe.
We do seem to have a hard cap of around 120 which basically hasn't moved - we are just bringing the averages closer to it. I'm optimistic we'll go past it but not without some advances on a different level of everything so far.
1 reply →
> but we’ll need to do a bit of research to get us to 150, for instance
Indeed, but we could additionally to research also do something against the most common causes of (early) death - the more people live longer, the higher the chance is that one of those who has not suffered a preventable death is the one that lives to be 150 years.
And there's a lot that we can easily tackle at relatively low cost compared to the gains (both in productivity and years-lived): incentivize people to quit or reduce alcohol and tobacco consumption, make high quality food affordable and accessible to everyone (=combat "food deserts"), reduce working hours in a first step towards 40 hours and then 30 or even 20 hours, reduce commute times, mandate vaccinations for everything that Army soldiers get across the population, increase access to cancer awareness programs and to first-class physical and mental healthcare so that cancer and other illnesses can get detected and treated early enough...
In the tortoise's case, not being a mammal is the encouraging factor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit
Which makes this "feature" of COVID-19 very concerning: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8201243/
Tortoises (and greenland sharks) are cold-blooded, living life in the slow lane, which makes things much easier. Hummingbirds OTOH, have an insane longevity metabolism pairing. My bet is that bats, parrots and naked mole rats probably have more to teach us about longevity than tortoises.
This blog (0) - "The Oldest Living Things in the world" has a incredible old organisms.
Although not mobile like Jonathan, the trees and moss are really old. Some are 12,000 years old. Still Amazing.
(0) - http://oltw.blogspot.com/
Someone once told me that the finite human lifetime is not a constraint of physics or biology, but evolution. The fact that older organisms decay and die gives an opportunity for new organisms (potentially, with superior genes) to thrive.
If there was no finite lifetime, then the benefit of physical maturity would allow older organisms to perpetually outcompete the younger ones, reducing the rate of genetic adaptation and the fitness of species overall.
Does anyone with specific knowledge know if this is true? If so, it's a little bit depressing to think that aging is simply a programmed biological process, "deliberately" degrading our bodies on a schedule and killing us off to make room for something new, rather than any sort of fundamental limitation of the underlying system.
I've read it's not so much that a particular aging trajectory is selected for, it's that mechanisms that shorten lifespan aren't selected against depending on ecology, social structure, and so forth. I imagine that's not entirely accurate, though, as there are some species that have definite senescence patterns that are closely tied to important developmental events (e.g., octopuses and egg laying).
It's difficult for me to imagine something that selects for individual death per se, but I can imagine certain cellular repair mechanisms and so forth, with death at a certain age being a secondary consequence, being selected for depending on a host of factors. Evolution tends to be somewhat chaotic in that what's adaptive depends on prior evolutionary history to some extent.
I mean during a long period humans were probably mainly dying of other things than old age? Wisdom and skill transfer must have had huge importance, but the chance of reaching 200 years of age must have been miniscule for a long part of our race's time on earth even if they could live that long.
On the other hand it means that there are some benefits which are correlated with age or else this mechanism wouldn’t be necessary.
Our culture mostly looks on old age with disdain. And indeed not just old age but any kind of aging past 25. And to be sure there are many objective downsides to being old compared to young. However one does also have the opportunity to attain knowledge and wisdom as one gets older. And that can continue until one starts to become senile, which might only start in very advanced years for many or most people!
Even though they're more athletic in their early twenties, most basketball players seem to peak around 27-29, I assume because of the intersection of athleticism and skill gained from experience.
See how Wikipedia describes it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageing#Ageing_versus_immortali...
If very process of sexual reproduction that brought humans into existence is entangled with the process of aging, there is probably no reason to think that humans (or any species that reproduces sexually) could somehow change or evolve to become immortal.
Makes sense. We could sure use fewer 80yo congresspeople and more 40yo congresspeople in America.
Wonder if he remembers anything from when he was young, if that's even possible for a tortoise.
I'm curious how their brains lay down memories. I would imagine he probably does as I don't think there is a huge variation in content to be honest...
Some humans are capable of recalling every detail of their lives. That is an incredible amount of information that a human brain can store.
I don't suppose a 200yrs 'ordinary' old human would run into any problems with memory storage.
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Imagine living that long, that would be some experience witnessing world go faster and faster with each decade.
You'd literally experience steam power industrialisation progressing all the way to information tech era.
That would give you some incredible perspective.
Looks good! Hasn't aged a bit since 1886. Same sized shell still fits.
I wonder if the life-extension (longevity) researchers have studied tortoises, probably?
But not mammals and "cold blooded" (ectothermic) so they are probably too different to be helpful.
He just might live long enough to see all 3 World Wars!
So what do they have that we don't have?
Sex with Emma and Fred
I met Jonathan in 2016. AMA.
What did he tell you when you met?
Hey, you look exactly like your great great great great great grandfather!
Just imagine the things he's lived through. I hope you talked to him a long time
He was busy eating, which is apparently what he does most of the time. Relaxing to watch.
Jonathan was born on St Helena, ~10 years after the death of Emperor Napoleon on that island. Re-incarnation?
Jonathan was probably not born on St Helena, since he was a gift from elsewhere.
Totally right, he did arrive on St Helena 40-50 years into his life! Just like someone else did.
Napoleon wouldn't be that lucky.
Are tortoises born, or hatched?
Both surely, egg comes out of mom, baby comes out of egg. Pretty good as long as one of the days isn't Christmas.
And do they celebrate his hatchday with a hatchday cake?
In what belief system does rebirth depend on spatiality?