A living tree is older than the pyramids
At least one Great Basin bristlecone pine alive today germinated before the Great Pyramid was built.
Strong2 min read
Edmund Schulman's coring campaign in the White Mountains of California found bristlecones more than 4,000 years old. Methuselah, cored in the 1950s and still living, dates to roughly 2800 BCE. Khufu's pyramid was finished around 2560 BCE. The tree is the older structure, and it is not a ruin.
An older tree, later named Prometheus, was cut in 1964 to settle an argument about the coring method. Its ring count was about 4,900. The method was confirmed and the tree was dead. The living champions are left unlabelled on the mountain, which is the right kind of caution.
Caveats
- Germination years from ring counts have an uncertainty of years, not of centuries. The inequality with the pyramid is not close.
- Clonal organisms — the Oregon fungus, some shrubs — can be older as genetic individuals. This claim is about a single trunk that is still alive.
Sources
- 1Schulman E.. Bristlecone pine, oldest known living thing. National Geographic 113, 1958.