Meet The 256 YEAR OLD Man With 24 Wives & 200 Descendants

If you research this topic, there are many reports from around the world about who is the oldest person to have ever lived.  There's the 131-year-old dad-of-three from Brazil, there are reports of a farmer and community elder who was said to be 160 years old in Ethiopia but none of them comes close to Li Ching-Yuen who purportedly lived to be 256.

According to his obituary titled “Tortoise-Pigeon-Dog,” published in 1933 and featured in the New York Times and Time Magazine. Li Ching-Yuen said he was born in 1736, but records discovered by Professor Wu Chung- chien , of Minkuo University, showed Li was actually born in 1677 in Qing Jiang Xian in Sichuan province China. and there were even congratulatory letters from the Imperial Chinese Government wishing him well on his 150th and 200th birthdays.

According to an article published by the Pittsburgh Press on October 2, 1929:

In the opinion of Professor Wu Chung-Chieh, dean of the department of education at Minkuo University here. The man in question is Li Ching-Yung. Dynastic records verify to the professor’s satisfaction that Li is now in his two hundred and fifty-second year, or more than one-fourth as old as Methuselah, the old man of the Bible who lived 969 years.

Li Ching-Yun, according to professor…. has records to show he was born in 1677, during the reign of the emperor Kang Hai, the second emperor of the Manchu dynasty. When Li attained the age of 100 years, in 1777, his “old age” was considered remarkable, and the provincial authorities petitioned the imperial government for an appropriate recognition. The government at Peking consented, and it is declared the order for this action is contained in the dynastic records.

But Li kept on living, the reports go, and astonished his neighborhood by reaching his two hundredth year. The imperial government was surprised to get a petition urging further recognition and, according to Professor Wu, verified the old man’s great age in the records.

Professor Wu understands that Li speaks readily concerning events in his life, and has no trouble recalling incidents which occurred more than 150 years ago.

A 1933 Times article further noted that:

Li Ching-yun, a resident of Kaihsien, in the Province of Szechwan, who contended that he was one of the world’s oldest men, and said he was born in 1736 — which would make him 197 years old — died today.A Chinese dispatch from Chung-king telling of Mr. Li’s death said he attributed his longevity to peace of mind and that it was his belief every one could live at least a century by attaining inward calm.

Li was a doctor specializing in herbs, he was a qigong master, and tactical consultant. There’s not much information about the earlier years of his life but supposedly Li was a child prodigy and avid traveler who had already trecked to Manchuria, Thailand, and Tibet in his search for herbs by the time he was 10 years old. Li worked with herbs, searched for them and sold them for the next 100 years of his life. 

In regards to his personal life, Li was said to have married 24 times and outlived 23 of his wives. Another report says that at the time of his death Li had 180 - 200 living descendants, spanning eleven generations.

The secret to a long life

 Li once told Wu Pei Fu a Chinese warlord that his secret of longevity is:

“Keep a quiet heart, sit like a tortoise, walk sprightly like a pigeon and sleep like a dog.”

That’s kinda different from how I do things as I tend to sleep like a tortoise and eat like a dog. Li’s life was fairly simple. He did not drink hard liquor or smoke and ate his meals at set times. He was a vegetarian and frequently drank goji berry tea. He went to bed early and got up early and he meditated daily, something he supposedly learned from Taoist priests.

Li was also a very kind and generous individual, it was said that In his spare time he liked to play cards and would often lose on purpose, but just enough to pay for his opponent’s meals for that day. Because of this, he was very well liked.

New Fossil Discovery in Morocco Will rewrite Human History

Well, time to change the text books…

Until now, researchers believed that the first ever modern humans or Homo sapiens, came out of East Africa about 200,000 years ago. But in Jebel Irhoud a remote region of Morocco in what was once a cave. A team of European and Moroccan scientists has found five fossil remains that dates back to about 315,000 years ago, which would make them the oldest modern humans ever found.

This is a huge breakthrough because it would mean our species evolved across africa more than 100,000 years earlier.

Shannon McPherron/Nature

According to a report in the Journal Nature, The international team of researchers led by Jean-Jacques Hublin who directs the department of human evolution at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology uncovered a skull, bones along with some stone tools.

In a statement Hublin said: "This material represents the very root of our species, the oldest Homo sapiens ever found in Africa or elsewhere,"

“We used to think that there was a cradle of mankind 200, 000 years ago in east Africa, but our new data reveal that Homo sapiens spread across the entire African continent around 300,000 years ago,” he explains

He added “Until now, the common wisdom was that our species emerged probably rather quickly somewhere in a ‘Garden of Eden’ that was located most likely in sub-Saharan Africa,”

“Long before the out-of-Africa dispersal of Homo sapiens, there was dispersal within Africa,” says Hublin.

The fossils found were surrounded by gazelle and other animal bones and scientists believe that these homo sapiens mainly hunted for their food. The fossil also shows that although our ancestors brains functioned differently they did have similar faces as our own.

The discovery of the site was not new, a few pieces of skull and flint blades were found by moroccan miners at the Jebel Irhoud site in 1961, but the horrendous dating techniques used back then estimated the remains to be only 40,000 years old. It wasn't until the 1980s when Jean-Jacques Hublin took a closer look at one jawbone that he realized something didn’t add up.

Hublin said although the teeth was similar to modern humans, the shape seemed very primitive. Thus starting in 2004 Dr. Hublin and his team started to excavate Jebel Irhoud once again and found more fossils, including five skull bones and burnt flint blades. Scientists used  a method called thermoluminescence to estimate how long it has been since the blades were burned and estimated the blades to be around 300,000 years old.

Of course a claim so big could not be without its detractors.

John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin said that it was a plausible idea, but that recent discoveries of fossils from the same era raise the possibility that they were used by other hominins. The only way to resolve the question will be to find more hominin fossils from the time when our species emerged.