[imagesource:flickr]

People flock to Egypt every year to visit the 4,500-year-old Great Pyramid of Giza, but not many know that somewhere in the US is a tree that was already growing by the time the first blocks were laid by the Pharaohs.

High in California’s White Mountains stands a Bristlecone Pine tree ( Pinus longaeva ) known as Methuselah, that is the oldest living tree on the planet at 4 850 years old. To put this into perspective, by the time the Trojan war was kicking off around 1200 BC, this tree was already a thousand years old.

Methuselah is named after the biblical figure who lived to be 969 years old, but even he was a baby when compared to the historic tree.

Bristlecone Pines have a distinct gnarled appearance from decades of growth that literally mold over every few hundred years, and have a unique ability to only sustain branches and leaves that grow well, ensuring that no energy goes to waste.

The location of this tree is, for obvious reasons, a secret, and its discovery led to the creation of the Great Basin National Park in order to protect it and other trees from the species.

Methuselah wasn’t always the oldest tree. Once there was another Bristlecone Pine nicknamed Prometheus that was accidentally cut down by a researcher whose core sampler got stuck in the trunk. To his absolute horror, the core samples showed the tree to be over 5 000 years old, but by then it was pretty much firewood.

Bristlecone Pines are notoriously slow growers and average about 0.02cm a year. They are fortunately not the only geriatrics around, and a clonal forest of Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides) in Utah, known as Pando, has been shown to be as old as 14,000 years. The enormous forest is a collection of genetically identical stems which sprang from one single seed.

Dubbed “faithful chroniclers of the world’s weather patterns,” we have a lot to learn from ancestral trees. If trees are your jam, you can check out the below doccie about Methuselah:

[source:ancientorigins]