Brazilian takes crown as world's oldest person (AP)

SAO PAULO – A 114-year-old Brazilian woman is the world's oldest living human, Guinness World Records said Wednesday.

Maria Gomes Valentim attributes her longevity to eating a daily roll of bread for breakfast along with fruit — though she indulges in the occasional nip of wine.

Guinness said that Valentim, aged 114 years and 313 days, is 48 days older than the world's former oldest human, Besse Cooper from Monroe, Georgia.

Cooper now holds the title of the oldest living North American.

Guinness verified that Valentim was born on July 9, 1896, in Carangola in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais, where she has always lived.

Known as "Grandma Quita," Valentim's family says she has a stubborn streak and has always made a habit of minding her own business. They also say her own father lived to be 100.

"She says she has lived long because she has always taken care of her own life — and not the life of others," granddaughter Jane Ribeiro Moraes, 63, told a local newspaper.

Moraes added that Valentim has a great affection for feijoada — Brazil's national dish, a hearty bean stew with various cuts of salted pork meat — and chicken empada pastries "with a lot of hot sauce."

Craig Glenday, editor in chief of Guinness World Records, said Valentim represents an unprecedented feat for Brazil.

"To receive a claim from a woman born during the reign of Queen Victoria — before the Ford Motor Company was formed, or before even George and Ira Gershwin, were born — is remarkable in itself, but for that woman to be Brazilian makes it extra special. Never has a successful claim for longevity emerged from Brazil — until now," he said.

Guinness said it has received several claims for potential "super centenarians" — but none before were ratified because of a lack of evidence or documentation.

Bound to a wheelchair but mostly in decent health, relatives hope the attention for Valentim might help out her financial situation. They say the woman gets by on Brazil's minimum pension — $335 a month — and relies on the public health system, as the humble family can't afford to pay for private health insurance.

Valentim married her husband Joao in 1913, but he died in 1946. They had one son, four grandchildren, seven great grandchildren and five great-great grandchildren.

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World's oldest man dies at 114

he said.

Breuning was born on Sept. 21, 1896, in Melrose, Minn., and spent his early years in De Smet, S.D. That first decade of the 1900s was literally a dark age for his family. They had no electricity or running water. A bath for young Walter would require his mother to fetch water from the well outside and heat it on the coal-burning stove.

He lied about his age and got a job in Minnesota with the Great Northern Railway in 1916 at age 16. He moved to Great Falls two years later and remained a loyal railroad man for the rest of his life, working there for 50 years, marrying co-worker Agnes Twokey and traveling by airplane only once in his life.

He earned $90 a month for working seven days a week at the beginning, and amount that he said was

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How a 'Jester god' revealed oldest Mayan royal tomb

Jason Paling, Holmul Archaeological Project

The skeleton of the suspected 350 BC ruler, interred with pots covering his skull, a Mayan custom.

EnlargeCloseJason Paling, Holmul Archaeological Project

The skeleton of the suspected 350 BC ruler, interred with pots covering his skull, a Mayan custom.

The ancient Maya filled Central America with pyramid-dotted cities prior to a drawn-out abandonment of such sites around 850 A.D., one of archaeology's most storied mysteries. The unexpected find from the archaeological site of K'o (Kuh-OH) in modern-day Guatemala, reported here at the Society for American Archaeology meeting, pushes the first known Maya ruler, or "Ajaw," back two centuries to around 350 B.C.

"We have older Maya burials, but don't have ones with grave goods that include a royal symbol," says research associate John Tomasic of the University of Kansas, who found the burial site in 2008 at K'o. The remains found in K'o, which was a suburb, more or less, of a larger Maya site of Holmul, were under what seemed like the ruins of a wealthy, but normal, home.

"We excavated the floor of the building and just dug down until we found a lid," Tomasic says. Under the lid, about 16 inches across, ("just wide enough for a human body," he says), was a tunnel leading into a " chultun" (chull-TOON), a storage chamber. "We crawled in and shined a light and saw the burial."

Arrayed around the body of a man, likely in his 50's and seemingly in good health at the time of his death (aside from some arthritis and a few cavities in his teeth), were seven ceramic vessels, jars and plates. Most intriguing was a black incense burner, depicting a man wearing a distinctive headdress, marked by a trefoil shape on its forehead like the tassel of a jester's cap. This Maya jester god headdress is widely known among scholars as one of the earliest symbols of Maya rulership, seen in murals and carvings of kings from 100 B.C. or so, onwards.

"The real question here is how old was the body," says archaeologist Michael Callaghan of the University of Texas at Arlington, who was not on the research team, but presented the results for Tomasic at the meeting. The pots clearly belong to an era around 350 B.C. when Maya ceramics began to adopt a uniform " Sierra red" color. A sample of bone from the body was sent to a lab for radiocarbon dating, yielding the same age. "These are fairly persuasive numbers," Callaghan says.

Until now, the earliest known royal burial of a Maya ruler was from a site called San Bartolo unearthed in 2005, and dated to 100 B.C. Similarly, this burial also was found under a home, not buried inside a pyramid temple as with later Maya rulers.

"I think it is fair to say what we have found is the oldest known burial of a Maya ruler," Tomasic says. "And we have found the earliest depiction of a jester god headdress."

"This is rare, this is old. We don't find this every day," says archaeologist Andrew Kinkella of Moorpark (Calif.) College, who was not part of the research. Jester god images were inevitably connected with inherited political power among the ancient Maya, he says. "So, I think we could safely say this is one of the oldest burials known of a Maya ruler."

But what really matters about the find, Tomasic says, is that it shows the ancient Maya ideas about rulers were in place long before Maya kings declared themselves divine. That trend emerged in the later "Classic" period that saw the full flowering of ancient Maya writing and pyramid building. The so-called "Pre-Classic" era of the ancient Maya featured some of the same gods and notions of leadership that their descendants held until the time of the famed Maya collapse.

What looked like a distinctly different period, the Pre-Classic era, for the ancient Maya looks like a more connected one to their later lives. That means the famed pyramid builders of Central America had an even longer-lived civilization than suspected by scholars just a few decades ago. "I think we will find more of these royal burials too, older ones, as we look under more homes," Tomasic says.

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