Guatemalan May Be World's Oldest Person at 120

The world may have a surprise new "oldest person," and by a good margin, reports AFP. A daily newspaper in Guatemala reports that a woman named Juana Chox Yac has a government birth certificate that puts her age at 120. That would make her four years older than the current No. 1, Japan's Misao Okawa. But the Washington Post notes that the two leading authorities on such matters—the Guinness Book of World Records and the Gerontology Research Group—apparently have yet to confirm.

Yac is an indigenous Mayan who was born in a farming village called Santa Lucia Utatlan. She married at 15 and had two kids, but her husband died nine years later. She remarried at age 29 and had seven more children before becoming a widow for the second time in 1964. Government officials describe her as "lucid" and looking forward to her 121st birthday in November. (Click to read about what it's like to be 100.)