What is the relationship between an ancient corpus of marriages and the emergence of centenarians in the descendants? Comparison between a typical Sardinian "Blue Zone" village and a seemingly "normal" Belgian village

This genealogical study presents an innovative, exploratory approach to examining extreme longevity through historical genealogical data, and constitutes a first attempt that deserves to be shared by our fellow researchers. Specifically, it quantitatively investigates whether there is a link between the number of centenarians among descendants and the characteristics of ancient local marriage corpora within genealogical lineages rooted in two rural communities. This method makes it possible to illustrate an aspect of “distant” heritability of extreme longevity.