Borat's Great Grandmother?

In August of 1997, Jeanne Calment of France died at the age of 122 -- the oldest verified person on record. Mdme. Calment may have a challenger in one Sohan Dosova of Kazakhstan.

Meet Sohan Dosova - the newly found treasure of Kazakhstan. She is 130 years old, at least she is according to her documents. The Soviet passport issued in the early 1980s states that Sohan Dosova was born in the Karaganda region on 27 March 1879.

Wikipedia has a list of verified oldest people.

130 is considerably older than any other contender for the award of Oldest Person. Excluding Sohan Dosova, the top five ages are 122, 120[?], 119, 117, and 117. Notice that the other contenders for Oldest Person are all within two years of the next person on the list. There is a whopping 8 year gap between Dosova and Clement. Likely there was some exaggeration in Dosova’s age. We don’t have her birth certificate, only a passport that dates from the early 1980s. That’s about 25 years ago. If she claims to be 130 now, she would have been claiming an age over 100 then -- something that would have been a feather in her hat even at that time. Even so, she might be a real contender.

If she really is 130, shouldn’t she have great-great-grandchildren, or even great-great-great-grandchildren by now? Assuming generations of 25 years, there should be five generations of Dosovas. The article says her oldest granddaughter is 53. If Sohan had a child at 20 and that child had a daughter at the age of 25, that would make Sohan 98, not 130. A better estimate of her age could be reconstructed by looking at her family tree and working backwards from known and recorded birth dates.

Is there a way to verify a living person’s age directly? Telomeres shorten with each cell division. And the article says she still has one tooth left.

Source: BBC