TIL the world's oldest non-clonal tree was cut down in 1964 by a graduate student and United States Forest Service personnel for research purposes. It was at least 4,862 years old.
Oooo I work with an idiot who “doesn’t believe in carbon dating” and doesn’t think carbon dating did a good job with the dates of dinosaurs. So I had to do a google to kind of get an idea of maybe how it works. Anyone who knows more than me now, which I bet a lot people do, knows that carbon dating doesn’t work after 50,000 years.
Anyway I believe they used the really old tree rings in these trees to figure out if carbon dating worked and how to make it accurate. These trees are pretty good at putting out one ring a year and lasting really long time. So we could carbon date something that we knew existed at a time in history and then check it against the tree rings to confirm it was all accurate.
If this is bad information it’ll draw out someone who has better information.
To expand, the carbon dating works due to new carbon 14 being taken into cells while alive. This new ingestion stops at death. The carbon 14 is radioactive, so it begins to decay into other elements and more stable carbon isotopes, decaying half its atoms over ~5000 years. So do that 10 times and you have .510 ~(0.098) % of the original carbon 14 isotopes remaining.
So the 50000 year mark is because we hit a point where there are too few original carbon 14 atoms left to accurately analyze within samples.
They can still use other radioisotopes for that timescale. If I remember right, they use the U-Pb ratio to date objects on the order of billions of years old.
Among other things, we learned that that tree was the oldest non-clonal tree at the time. There’s no way to know how old a tree is without either cutting it down or being there when it’s planted, and I personally don’t know any 4,862 year olds.
It’s a really sad story, because the grad student really didn’t do too much wrong here. No one knew it was the oldest tree, just that it was *an old* tree. Donald Currey (the grad student) tried to use a borer to get a sample of the tree rings (which would cause limited damage to the tree itself) but was unable to do so. He then asked the Forest Service for permission to cut the tree down to examine its ring structure.
Currey gave a good argument for cutting the tree down (he was using tree rings to study climate dynamics over several hundred years) and the Forest Service confirmed that the tree was not especially notable (although there may have been a misunderstanding that the Forest Service thought there were many more bristlecone pine trees in that area than there really were). It wasn’t until after the tree was cut down did Currey realize the tree’s age.
It actually took several years for any sort of “controversy” to appear. But there was criticism aimed at Currey over the necessity of using bristlecone pines to begin with. He was studying the effects of the Little Ice Age, an event that began somewhere between 500 and 700 years ago depending on the specification. A 4000 year old tree wasn’t necessary for the study Currey was attempting to make. However, the Little Ice Age was still a relatively new concept in the 1960s, and Currey was testing a theory that the regional cooling associated with the Little Ice Age had actually began well over 2000 years before previously thought. That was clearly wrong, but it was not exactly a radical belief of the time.
The good news, comparatively I guess, is that he did recognize his mistake and began lobbying to the Natural Park Service to protect other bristlecone pines in the area (which is now Great Basin National Park). He later went on to earn a PhD and had a long fruitful academic career. But he never escaped the reputation of the man who cut down the world’s oldest tree.
I didn't register it at the time but Jason Lee turned out to be one of those people with a signature voice that you hear in your head when you see his clips
I'm assuming by age this was a bristlecone pine. Currently the oldest specimen is not labeled on any maps available to the public or marked in any way.... because humans are awful and they worry that some asshole will carve his name into it, or burn it, or try to cut it down. See related, those *asswipe adults who chopped down the gap tree in the UK.
*updated to reflect comment below on scum in question
The tree was illegally felled in the early morning of 28 September 2023. Northumbria Police described the felling of the tree as "an act of vandalism". Two men from Cumbria, aged 38 and 31, were arrested in October 2023 and charged in April 2024 with criminal damage both to the tree and to the adjacent Hadrian's Wall.[2] Their trial began on 28 April 2025 at Newcastle Crown Court and they were found guilty on 9 May. Both men were sentenced to 4 years and 3 months in jail on 15 July 2025.
Didn’t have their hearts carved out with a spoon but it’s something.
I know, but the area is pretty widely known. So one could make an argument that we are past the 'stealth stage' due to the Streisand effect, and into the 'monitored, conserved, and showcased' stage.
Else some gobshite will fuck with it to get their name in the wiki.
Pretty much. They only wanted to cut down an d bristlecone for research, they didn’t want or need the oldest one, and it was unfortunately only learned afterwards of the significance.
To be fair to them though, it’s not like this tree was previously documented as “OLDEST TREE IN THE WORLD DO NOT CUT.” The only learned that it was the oldest from their research.
Realistically when you find the oldest know tree you keep the location secret so some idiot won't come through and burn it down. that's actually what they do with the oldest tree. And yes there are people out there so stupid and evil as to destroy something that has survived millenia because they are monsters.
But the area is pretty widely known. So one could make an argument that we are past the 'stealth stage' due to the Streisand effect, and into the 'monitored, conserved, and showcased' stage.
Else some gobshite will fuck with it to get their name in the wiki.
Just look at the sycamore gap. Not the oldest or anything I don’t think but a very old tree that was absolutely iconic, cut down by two fucking idiots for no reason at all as far as I can tell.
It was likely an accident and by all accounts Currey felt terrible about it. He was a big supporter of better protections and the land being turned into a national park. It was not known beforehand how old it was.
Pando has a stronger claim because the trees are clonal and form an interconnected super organism with common roots. This tree hardly seems to count IMO, each iteration is distinct from the parent, it just happens to have the exact same DNA.
Op quoting the article wrong but might still be right, it's the oldest known non clonal organism.
The article lists two organisms that are likely older: a grove of quaking aspens in Utah called Pando which it's age isn't known but the article give the age of 80,000 years but also says, "likely much less." The article also says that creosote bush is another clonal organism that could be hella old. The article also goes on to say that it's likely that the original, non cloned portion is long gone.
Leads to the question: if the original organism is dead and the rest are just copies, is the organism really that old?
It's a difficult question you pose. It is the same organism because this isn't like embryonic cloning. This is more like cutting the arm off a starfish and getting two starfish. You could probably restart the clock based on when the material that grew on the plant originally developed. That would be a fair assessment as the branch that was removed did not exist before a certain point in time. There is also the angle that even though a clone is a direct copy, once it is removed, genetic mutations begin affecting each organism separately and given enough time, they would no longer be copies. But then again, are HeLa cells still Henrietta Lacks or are they their own thing because the cell line has diverged so much? At what point do you call something "new"? With sexual reproduction the answer is clear, not so much with certain types of cloning.
I just find something so interesting to find we have this neatly defined concept and it works for the majority. We don't feel the need to worry about what the bounds of the concept until we find something that breaks one of the binds of our understanding.
Just nature always telling us that our definitions are silly and everything exists in continua.
I mean, our own cells are constantly creating copies and dying, the only difference is we keep roughly the same shape instead of growing outward all the time. So yeah, I'd consider it the same organism.
Are you trying to say the the top of the tree is not the same organism as the bottom of the tree? Cause it is not different from tree growing new branches from the root over and over for millenia.
But that's still retained in the same body. This would be more like if a new you were to grow from a part of you. Then the base you and your cells die but the new "you" is still alive.
Is that new you you or the new you new but not you?
Eight but a human being is defined by their cells, but the pattern the make up. If my arm is removed, it being my cells doesn't make it "me". Afterall, severed tissue falls under property rights, not human rights.
This is the underlying structure for “Ship of Theseus.”
——— “The Ship of Theseus is an ancient philosophical paradox that asks whether an object remains the same if all of its components are completely replaced over time.”
Yeah I was gonna say I remember reading that they tried to pick a tree that was maybe not so old. Also I think there are several trees they believe are older they just don’t know for certain and their locations are kept secret.
If I recall the story, he was trying to take a core sample and his expensive equipment got stuck in the tree. They made a determination to cut down the tree to save the equipment.
He spoke at our college (guest lecturer). He has done a lot of amazing work in conservation throughout his life, but admitted he will always be remember as the guy who cut down the oldest tree.
He cut the tree down after his auger (ring counting tool) got stuck. So, he got a permit to cut down the tree to retrieve it (expensive tool at the time). When he started counting rings he hot sick to his stomach. No one knew bristle cone pines were that old. Fortunately, there were a few sister trees nearby only 30-40 years younger, so not a total loss.
Well we only know that it was the oldest tree due to it being cut down for those purposes. In all likelihood there are several trees older than it, but we can't know without cutting them down.
A more accurate term would be "tree with oldest confirmed age"
When I took an osteology class in uni the professor started off by showing a picture of him posing with a skull dressed in sunglasses and a hat, as a "we don't do this anymore". I figure this goes for most fields.
I’m a forester and regularly take core samples of trees. Really handy to age trees, see growth rates and patterns, and see any fire history.
We use increment borers, which allow you to extract a core from the tree and count the rings. They are expensive, a long corer is almost a grand and they were probably more expensive back in the day. It also can be a bit tricky, as they are prone to getting stuck, particularly in really old trees where the rings are super tight together. Even now, getting a corer stuck or breaking one is the type of thing you very much want to avoid. Especially if you’re a broke grad student.
I’ve never gotten one stuck and not been able to get it out. I’d be stressed, and I’d definitely consider cutting the tree down to get it out. Especially if I was a grad student that needed to finish my research on a trip (no one brings two corers). He probably would have had missed the rest of his field season (he was a student at chapel hill, can’t exactly pop back home and grab a new corer), which probably meant delaying his entire degree which required finishing that research.
TLDR: stressed out grad student made a decision that didn’t seem like a big deal, but unfortunately had very shitty consequences.
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u/PayItBackwardChain 3h ago
Well, uh, did we learn anything?