Technical and medical advances are unlikely to be able to stretch the human lifespan beyond a maximum of 125 years, a new study has claimed.

It found that humans were simply not built to carry on much longer than a century.

Years of steadily lengthening average ages are also likely to slowly grind to a halt as we are already near the maximum possible, they claimed.

Researchers examined survival data dating back to 1900 from more than 40 countries for the new study.

The data shows huge increases in average age.

However, it also highlighted how unusual it was to live beyond 100, regardless of the year in which people were born.

It led them to conclude that genetic factors were likely to limit the maximum possible to 125.

Lead researcher Professor Jan Vig, from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, said that data "strongly suggests" that human already reached peak lifespans in the 1990s.

The study ,published in the journal Nature, focused on people living to 110 or older between 1968 and 2006 in the US, UK, France and Japan.

Age at death for these super-centenarians rose rapidly between the 1970s and early 1990s but reached a plateau in the mid-1990s.

French woman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 aged 122, achieved the longest documented lifespan of any person in history.

The researchers put the current average life span of the oldest individuals on Earth at 115.