THE oldest woman in the world has celebrated a milestone, blowing out the candles on her 117th birthday cake this week.
Emma Morano (pictured) lives in the northern Italian mountain town of Verbania, and received an official greeting from Italy's president wishing her "Serenity and good health".
Morano was born in 1899, and in an interview last year attributed her unusual longevity to a diet of three raw eggs a day.
She recently added 150g of raw steak, after a bout of anaemia.
the increasing proliferation of caesarean deliveries is "affecting human evolution," according to a researcher from the University of Vienna in Austria.
Dr Philipp Mitteroecker from the university's department of theoretical biology collated statistics showing an increase in the number of women who need surgery to deliver a baby due to their narrow pelvis size.
"Women with a very narrow pelvis would not have survived birth 100 years ago...they do now, and pass on their genes encoding for a narrow pelvis to their daughters," he said.
Another factor is higher general levels of health which have led to a trend towards larger newborns, according to the research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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