High in the arid mountain forests of eastern California there is a living tree that's older than the pyramids of Giza and the ancient city-state of Babylon, but its location is a secret.
Scientists believe the Methuselah tree, named after an especially long-living character in the Book of Genesis, is estimated to have started growing roughly 4,857 years ago in the White Mountains just north of Death Valley, according to The Independent.
That would put its germination date around 2,833 BC, nearly 3,000 years before the foundation of the Roman Empire and older than all Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Scientists believe it is either the oldest or second-oldest living tree known to humanity, excepting clonal colonies, in which individual trees live and die as part of the same ancient collective organism.
Even so, the Forest Service does not disclose the exact location of the Methuselah tree and has not marked it in any way, in order to protect it from vandalism.
Methuselah is the oldest known tree in the Methuselah Grove, which stands at nearly 10,000 ft above sea level in what is now Inyo National Forest.
It's a standout example of the Great Basin bristlecone pine, formally known as pinus longaeva. Because they are adapted to live in such harsh environments the trees are extraordinarily resilient and resistant to infection.
Through a process called “strip barking”, even a tiny sliver of the tree can remain alive after the rest expires, with thin strands of living matter twisting up through a dense shell of dead wood.
But bristlecone pines aren't the only arboreal survivors on Earth. Some scientists believe there is a Patagonian cypress tree in the rainy mountains of Chile that is around 5,400 years old.
Known as the Millennial Alerce, or sometimes Gran Abuelo (Spanish for “grandfather”), the tree's age was estimated using a new statistical method that is not yet broadly accepted among researchers, rather than by the traditional way of counting rings of wood within the trunk.
Clonal colonies — that is, groups of trees that have all sprouted off from the same ancient ancestor — can persist for many millennia, even as the individual trees live and die.
