why does everyone in ROSHI's family have such a long life?

[flashback0180]

Master Roshi is around 340 and his older sister Fortune teller BABA is more than 500 years old.


And in dragonball when roshi met Baba she complained that Roshi didn't come to visit their MOTHER(who was still alive).

[Gaffer Tape]

Well, I can pretty much guarantee that mother business is dub nonsense. But it doesn't seem impossible for beings with exceptionally long lives to exist in the Dragon Ball world. Both Tsuru'Sennin and Tao Pai Pai are pretty old too. As for why, that's a bit more unclear. That is, if we're not just meant to accept that anyone, given how they live, has the potential to do so. It would seem the most logical that the Sennins are able to do so due to their extensive training and removal from worldly concerns. Kame'Sennin also claims to have drunk an immortality elixir, but we see how well that works out. But it could have done much to lengthen his life.

[Mr. Piccolo]

I always assumed that they had found some secret to extreme longevity, if not immortality. Muten Roshi has a pretty laidback lifestyle; I can't see that guy having much stress. Baba is a magician, right? She can move between the worlds of the living and the dead, so perhaps she found some magical spell or potion to give her extreme longevity.

[Gyt Kaliba]

I don't remember the line about the mother, but if I had to guess it was probably something meant as a joke line to further address that Roshi and Baba don't really get along greatly and rarely visit, rather than a serious assertion that their mom is still around. That said though, I almost wouldn't be surprised if she was...there we go, Toriyama. Forget giving random characters new siblings, your next addition to the universe can be Roshi's parents.

Jokes aside, I would assume that the Sennin status is a major possibility for how both Turtle and Crane have kept kicking for so long. With Baba, it could just be her own connections with the afterlife at work, or something. That still leaves Tao as an elephant in the room though...looking at Herms' timeline, he'd be 291 when he fought Goku the first time. Maybe the humanity of Dragon Ball just used to be naturally long lived but for some reason that started to fail? ...Hell, maybe whatever went wrong there is also why the collective populace lost so much intelligence as time went on too, heh.

[Herms]

And in dragonball when roshi met Baba she complained that Roshi didn't come to visit their MOTHER(who was still alive).

That line's only in the dub.