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Lost Paradise.” It has been given these labels because of the valley’s solitude, serenity, clean air, dazzling sun, nearly constant blue sky, pure mineral drinking water, helpful neighbors, lack of illness, and a kind of ubiquitous beauty that penetrates to one’s soul and provides a sense of well-being. 1
     
    Dr. Leaf, ever the careful scientist, was not inclined to use such lyrical prose. But he was impressed by the considerable number of active oldsters whose lifestyles he and his medical associates were able to examine. These included a 103-year-old woman whom Leaf watched thread a sewing needle without the aid of eyeglasses, and a 95-year-old woman he found happily at work in the local bakery. After examining the elderly woman in the bakery, Leaf commented, “Her health through her long life has been excellent. She has a good heart and is in excellent condition.” 2

HOW OLD ARE THEY REALLY?
     
    As in Abkhasia, though, there has been a great deal of controversy over the actual ages of the elders in Vilcabamba and serious doubtabout the most extreme of the superlongevity claims. Claiming an age of 167 when the oldest fully authenticated human age known to modern science is 122 is not the quickest route to credibility.
    Verifying the ages of old people in places like Abkhasia and Vilcabamba is never as simple as it sounds. Unlike the case in Abkhasia, where there are hardly any records to speak of, there are baptismal records in Vilcabamba that have been kept by the local church and birth records kept by the Civil Registry that go back as far as 1860. But the records are old and incomplete. There are pages missing, and pages so worn they cannot be read. What is more, Vilcabamban parents have not always registered the births of their children. And to make things even more confusing, cousins and other close relatives in Vilcabamba have often been given the same names.
    Several years after the excitement about longevity in Vilcabamba had grown to a worldwide phenomenon, two American scientists—Dr. Richard B. Mazess, a radiologist, and Dr. Sylvia H. Forman, an anthropologist—sought to arrive at as much certainty as possible about the ages of the elders in Vilcabamba. They performed a meticulous house-by-house census, then checked all the birth, death, and marriage records that they could find, and finally cross-checked the various documents against one another. It was a bewildering maze of documentation, but Mazess and Forman eventually concluded that there had been a consistent pattern of age inflation.
    For example, in the case of a man who had claimed to be 132 shortly before his death, they found that the man had actually been only ninety-three at the time of his death. Apparently, the man had attempted to appear older than he actually was by adopting as his own the baptismal certificate of an older deceased relative who shared the same name. It turned out that his mother had in fact been born five years after his own stated birth date, something that even the heroic modern advances in reproductive technology have not been able to replicate. 11
    Mazess and Forman ultimately came to believe that this kind of thing was common, and that none of the twenty-three self-proclaimed centenarians then living in the village of Vilcabamba had actually reached the age of 100. When they published their findings in
The
Journals of Gerontology
in 1979, they titled their article “Longevity and age exaggeration in Vilcabamba, Ecuador,” and declared that “extreme ages were either incorrect or unsubstantiated.” 12 As a result, many in the scientific community came to believe that longevity in Vilcabamba had been totally discredited.
    At that time, Vilcabamba had only about a thousand residents. Mazess said that in a population that small, it would be out of the ordinary if even a single person over the age of 100 were to be found, and truly remarkable if there were two people of such an age. He listed ten people who