Fact Check: The oldest living woman in the world isn’t from Pakistan, but Japan

New Delhi (Vishvas News): A post is going viral on social media in which three photographs of an old woman can be seen. As per the claim, the woman shown in the photos is the oldest living woman in the world and is from Pakistan. Vishvas News investigated and found the post to be misleading. The pictures in the post aren’t of the same person. The oldest living woman in the world is from Japan and not Pakistan.

Claim

Three photographs of an old woman are going viral on social media. The caption with the post reads: “The oldest woman on Earth from Pakistan celebrate her 217th years birthday today. To God be the glory.”

The archived version of the post can be checked here.

Investigation

We started our investigation by investigating each of the photos one by one.

We searched for the above photo using Google Reverse Image Search. We found the same image in a video on Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBwAgPQNFK0

As per the claim, this woman is 217 years old from Pakistan. But, the video caption claims the woman is 300-year-old and not 217 years from Pakistan. Vishvas News cannot independently verify the authenticity of the YouTube video, or how old the woman is in the video. But, the same image is used in the video mentioning different ages.

We investigated the second photo and tried to find its authenticity.

Using Google Reverse Image Search we found that the video in the reports of several media outlets. As per a report, the above photo is of Li Chi Yuen, a Chinese herbalist and martial artist. He was born in 1677 and died on May 6, 1933, at the age of 256.

This proves the three photos going viral is not of the same person.

We now searched for the third photo.

We could not confirm the source of the third photo in the post but it is evident that there are several doubts about the authenticity of this claim.

Oldest living woman in the world

According to Guinness World Records, Kane Tanaka from Fukuoka, Japan, has been officially confirmed as the oldest person living at 116 years 66 days old as of 9 March 2019.

Oldest living man in the world

According to Guinness World Records, on 10 September 2021, Spain’s Saturnino de la Fuente García became the oldest person living (male) at the incredible age of 112 years and 211 days.

Vishvas News contacted Adeel Jaffrey, Commissioning Editor, Dawn News Pakistan regarding the viral post. He said: “The oldest living woman so far isn’t from Pakistan. However, I couldn’t verify who the lady in the viral post is. If this is true, this would have been in news in Pakistan.”

The post is shared on Facebook by a page named African History. When we scanned the page we found that the page has followers.

Conclusion: Vishvas News investigated and found the post to be misleading. the pictures in the post isn’t of the same person. The oldest living woman in the world is from Japan and not Pakistan.

Tags

• Fact Check