I know my real age, I have a birth certificate.
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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Ya, they should have worded the title more accurately. It's a reference to your biological age, which is the age of your cells/tissues/organs. You have a variation of biological ages across your different cells/tissues/organs. This makes it pretty wild the education of your grandparents would have any impact on it!
I can't help but to read this as "guess the omitted variable". There's just no way of controlling for everything that might explain this, and it's obviously not the grandparents' time in educational institutions in itself that does the trick.
Thankfully, one of the authors summarized it well:
This opens up a myriad of possible explanations and will need to be replicated.
It's easy to imagine ways this effect makes perfect sense, especially if it's small. So the question kind of becomes what they have managed to successfully control for.