Today's Botany Photo of the Day is Pinus longaeva, bristlecone pine. Trees of this species are generally considered to be "the longest-lived of all sexually reproducing, nonclonal species." Many of them are over 4000 years old including this one, from Wheeler Peak in Nevada. It is located in the same area as the oldest known tree, the 4,862 year old tree formerly known as "Prometheus" before it was cut down [The Martyred One].
If the world was created in 4004 B.C. then the deluge can be reliably dated to about 2450 B.C., which means that Prometheus was living for 400 years before the flood and must have survived it. Isn't that amazing?
6 comments :
Maybe God liked that particular tree and decided to spare it (just like Jesus cursed an individual fig tree 2400 years later). Or maybe it survived in a hollow log or a trapped air bubble of some kind. Scientists just have no imagination.
I'll bet Ken Ham, Kent Hovind and others who make careers from pimping the creation myth of a Bronze Age warrior desert tribe would bristle at this bristlecone pine's longevity . . . .
Thank you for this post.
I still feel a twinge every time I read about Prometheus, cut down in the name of research no less. That's a bedtime scare story I won't tell!
Though Wikipedia contributes that the reclusive Methuselah has now an estimated age of 4 839 a, so hopefully we will see it become older.
In any case, those trees were there then that desert tribe warred its way into history and elevated the common flood myth to religious stature. But apparently such "pathetic level of detail" isn't enough when it comes from a certain direction.
I believe the Standard Excuse is that trees can lay down more than one growth ring in a year, thus you can't trust the tree-ring dates. So there, you damned uniformitarian heathens, you!
"thus you can't trust the tree-ring dates."
I wouldn't trust any dates that relies on rings instead of more normal methods like restaurants. :-P
Let me guess, any additional tree rings are signs of unusual or traumatic events such as local forest fires or droughts, so they are both quite easily detected and accounted for both individually (for example, by not necessarily spanning the whole circumference) and in correlations between samples. Is that close enough to how the actual measurement method works out?
I did some pressure calculations. These trees can be found up to 11 000 ft asl. Let's round off Everest to 29 000 ft (the minimum hieght of the flood), the water then at the upper limit is 18 000 ft deep. That's a pressure of 532 atmospheres. Lets take the fortingall yew, which may be up to 5000 years old. That grows at 426 feet. That's a presure of 844 atmospheres.
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