A Russian woman who was believed to be the oldest person ever to live has died in the Caucasus Mountains.
Nanu Shaova's passport claimed she was 128 years old, having supposedly been born before the last Tsar Nicholas II took the throne. If true, she would have been the oldest person in the history of the world.
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However, Nanu has faced some scepticism over her age, as - like for many elderly people in the Caucasus - her birth records no longer exist.
Her passport showed her as birthday as 00.00.1890 because she remembered only the year of her birth, and not the day or month.
Even so, she was registered two years ago in the Russia Book of Records as the oldest person in the country.
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A tribute from officials in her region after her death on Monday said: "Nanu Shaova, a centenarian from the village of Zayukovo, in Kabardino-Balkaria's Baksan district, and Russia's oldest woman, according to the Russia Book of Records, has died at the age of 128.
"She would have turned 129 in May.
"The administration of Baksan district offers its most sincere condolences to her family."
Married twice, Nanu had a total of eight children, 19 grandchildren, 33 great-grandchildren and seven great-great-grandchildren.
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Reputed to have been 27 at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution and 101 when the USSR collapsed, Nanu put her old age down to a combination of hard work and sour milk - preferring a local drink called Ayran (a mixture of yoghurt and chilled or iced water) to tea.
Her son Hussein has admitted that while she had a clear recollection of WWII, she 'hardly remembered' the First World War, even though she should have been 28 when it ended.
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He said: "She did not have any kind of special diet. She only said that it is important to work a lot.
"She said - the more and the better you work, the healthier you will be.
"There was something genetic in it too - her mother, my granny lived for 117 years."
The oldest documented person is Jeanne Calment from France, who lived for 122 years and 164 days, and died in 1997.
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The world's oldest man, meanwhile, very recently passed away.
After being recognised in April 2018 by Guinness World Records as the world's oldest male, 113-year-old Masazo Nonaka died on Sunday 20 January, according to Japanese public service broadcaster NHK.
However, the oldest ever living man was Jiroemon Kimura, a Japanese man who lived to 116 years and 54 days old, dying in June 2013.
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