The Curse Of The Methuselah Tree | Oldest Tree On Earth | Timeline

[Music] your roots go a long way back two and a half thousand years before Christ was born 26 foot tall and still growing you are the oldest living thing on earth rock solid and transfixed you've taken life slowly unlike our human race [Music] that's us down there Las Vegas glowing in the desert are you sad are you jealous if you could speak what would you tell us [Music] once you had a Garden of Eden now you have this the playpen in the desert bliss here 5,000 years of civilization can be experienced an instant have a nice day and joy for in a flash it could all be over Kings emperors deities Craven images cast in plaster neon lit look on my works ye mighty and despair the smell of money in the air a tawdry song Lumiere [Music] [Music] your immortals are mortal labor once flesh-and-blood escaped the delusion the noise and pollution the true immortals are made out of wood they call us Bristlecone pines they call me Methuselah [Music] [Music] you live 11,000 feet up in the White Mountains of California where the climate is so harsh little else can survive it's no surprise you look more dead than alive [Music] adversity is the secret of your success shunning lush meadows for naked rock you have taught yourself to thrive in this parched landscape with little food or water like wartime children brought up on a meager diet you far outlive your vigorous cousins further down the mountain your scrawny bodies atrophy on the outside while preserving a hidden vitality within you survive on a lifeline only ten inches wide a strip of bark covered tissue which manages to carry all essential nutrients from your roots to your needles the slow pace of life keeps you slim we humans could take a leaf out of your frugal lives it takes a hundred years to add an inch to your waistline could it be that deep within yourselves you hold the key to immortality your secret seemed safe in this rocky wilderness until one day in 1957 a scientist walked into your life the scientists name was Edmund Schulman and he was about to make the most exciting discovery of his life in the cross-section he removed from your body he counted over 4600 rings each representing exactly one year of life by inspecting the width of each ring he could tell what kind of a year you'd had and whether the climate had promoted growth hidden within your trunk was a record of weather and time of unparalleled age and accuracy Schumann was the first to bring precision to the use of tree rings as dating instruments and climate recorders bristlecones were 1,500 years older than any other tree previously studied having found the oldest tree of all he named you Methuselah Methuselah Methuselah this showman christens me for he has counted that candles on my cake 4600m celebrity now and no mistake am named am given voice the years like necklaces bestow a wisdom shrew mankind will never know millennia they come and go have no eyes but have seen it all ancient civilizations that you can only read about Methuselah has sensed am not part of history no history is parts of me [Music] 2566 BC not long after you'd taken root the largest stone building in the world is about to be occupied [Music] kinky ops had built the Great Pyramid of Giza as a tomb for himself he is lying on his deathbed [Music] the Pharaoh exhales for the last time his breath contains millions of carbon dioxide molecules imagine those molecules of spent breath cast adrift into the atmosphere riding the jet stream crossing oceans and continents a few reach a land that would later be called America perhaps you were too young to remember you were a mere sapling when one entered your body and through a tiny paw on the tip of a needle drawing energy from the Sun you split these molecules asunder the oxygen is first the carbon for you your complex chemistry bonds the carbon atoms into sugar that fuels your growth [Music] and that's how a molecule from a dying breath can give life to one of your new cells when kinky ops died you were 9 inches tall at only 77 years old [Music] during your first thousand years civilizations and the world beyond come [Music] then one day you had your first encounter with humanity [Music] [Applause] [Music] these hunters were Paiute Indians who for 3,000 years followed long horn sheep into the White Mountains leaving behind evidence of their brief visits here we go well this is a naturally occurring volcanic glass obsidian that's extremely abundant in this part of the world this is a volcanic Li active part of the world it's very easy to work and produces extremely sharp edges it's wonderful for us as well because it can be sourced to particular flows and so we can use it to understand where people are coming from and where they went we can reconstruct in in quite a bit of detail the annual rounds of people at different times in the past by looking at the sources of obsidian the day they collected used from the location of the obsidian lava flows archaeologists have established that the Indians would cover a distance of a hundred and fifty miles in the course of a year [Music] in the six weeks of summer when the weather opened up the mountaintops for hunting they would venture up to your domain [Music] small groups probably mostly hunters would come up to these Highlands a hut for a period of maybe a few days or a week trying and and get some meat maybe even dry it or partially dry it and then return down to the valleys where living conditions were a little better [Music] this is an extremely harsh environment it freezes almost every night here even during the middle of the summer the air is thin the wind is incessant it is not a comfortable place to be here it is the the middle of July and I'm wearing a Down Vest to give you some idea of just how harsh conditions are [Music] one summer it was so cold that had left you scarred for life the few cells that grew that year were damaged when the water inside froze up expanded and burst the cell walls when the tree rings were examined under a microscope the jagged black line clearly showed cell death in the year 16 20 8 BC what could have caused temperatures in that year to fall so dramatically could that frozen ring be a record of some cataclysmic event in another part of the world unlike words tree rings never lie one year was freezing cold and dark the Sun was hidden in the sky I tasted brimstone and it left its mark like a noose tightening like a charred wreath what is this thing I thought called death that acid taste of death came from a distant island in the Aegean Sea the eruption of the volcano on Santorini was probably the biggest bang in history its devastating effects are thought to wiped out the Minoan civilization of Crete the exact date has always been in dispute could a tree 7,000 miles away provide the answer scientists now think that the volcano shot a plume of ash into the stratosphere which spread as far as China and North America the thick veil of dust blocked the Sun causing temperatures to plummet and that's how your frozen tree ring told us the story of 1628 BC you can read me like a book open me up and take a look history laid bare a garland here a crown there plain as a pikestaff for all to see each year jotted down by me the state of the nation an annual report in ever decreasing circles the wheels of fortune the cycles of despair the Santorini frost ring made people realize the tree rings could date events in antiquity with incredible precision but since the early 1960s a group of tree scientists have been frustrated by the limitations imposed on the art by the age of the oldest living tree they wanted a dating instrument that would go back much further this man Tom Harlan spends his time combing groves for pieces of dead Bristlecone that may be even older than you by taking cores and sections out of logs and dead trees we can overlap our record and go further back in time so here we have living trees just very close to 5,000 years old but by using utilizing the logs and snags and what we call remnants just the fragments of wood that are lying on the ground we go back to the year 6700 BC are eight thousand seven hundred years ago as a continuous record his technique is to slide together sequences of rings from wood of different ages until they line up by 1969 the world had its first unbroken dating record going back nearly 9,000 years it was a perfect reference which could be used to check other dating systems [Music] it arrived at a time when the complicated chemistry of carbon dating was found to be flawed carbon dating depended for its accuracy on there being a constant level of radioactive carbon in the atmosphere however in the 1960s this was found not to be the case [Music] bristlecones came to the rescue [Music] scientists took ward of a known Dayton and then subjected it to radiocarbon dating to see how far out it was him they discovered the cobia by as much as a thousand years archeology was turned on its head dates always assumed to be right or wrong the leading theory of how European history evolved had to be revised you see we had all believed that the influence of the eastern Mediterranean had radiated outwards to the barbaric north weird thought Stonehenge was inspired by the sophisticated Mycenaeans of Greece in fact it turned out that Stonehenge was built long before that's why you and your kin are known as the trees that rewrote history while Europe was sliding into its Dark Age you were entering middle age when you were three and a half thousand years old you may recall a great change in the White Mountains the nomadic Paiute Indian hunters began putting down roots of their own about thirteen hundred years ago so five six hundred years after the birth of Christ we start to see a very different pattern where entire families or households would move up here to the highlands for many weeks or even a couple of months in the summer and they spent a long time up here exploiting the environment much more intensively than they had during that earlier hunting pattern and that suggests to us that that things in the lowlands where living conditions are generally a little easier in one sense it's certainly a warmer must have been pushed pushed to the point where all of a sudden these uplands became more worthwhile to exploit more intensively the rising population forced families to move up to 12,000 feet where they established the highest settlements in America in most instances we would have probably seen one two three families inhabiting one of these villages in any particular summer women probably would have spent a lot of their time collecting roots like Bitterroot Lucia and also the seeds of a lot of these grasses it's it's hard to imagine when you look at them the seeds are so tiny but those two were collected and he while men probably would have spent most of their time hunting in more distant areas for mountain sheep yet none of us working in this area doing archaeology in this area had any suspicions until about 1213 years ago that people lived in this in these harsh uplands in these kinds of settled permanent villages we always suspected that a little bit of hunting would have been would have been going on up here in the summer months but we had no notion that this kind of intensive village occupation was occurring Methuselah might have been a little bit worried at times as he watched people starting to use some of these ancient trees in ancient timber to build these houses to stoke their fires to build hunting fences and that sort of thing so maybe even a little bit of anxiety [Music] anxiety was soon to turn to terror not only for you Methuselah but also for the Indians [Music] the white man was coming [Music] [Music] the white immigrant took his time getting to California [Music] [Laughter] [Music] by the 1860s the canyons around you were echoing to the sounds of rocks being crushed and sifted prospectors were searching for silver and gold some continued to this day Allen Aitken has been working these hills for 40 years he barely makes enough to pay his way there's knowledge and skill involved in prospecting but there's always that element of chance since you can't really see underground there's a it could nevertheless fail and and no matter how poor something is there is at least some possibility that it could turn out to be something great so honestly I'm sure I I've spent a lot more than I've ever made but I still have hope there there's always the the odds that that enough time you're it's bound to pay off where you you know whether it'll pay you back for all the time you spin out is very doubtful but you spend enough time at it sooner or later you found to find something good [Music] if one prospector hit paydirt thousands of others followed each time a seam of silver or gold was struck they swarmed all over the mountain staking their claim greed being the human curse the richest silver mine was called Cerro Gordo in 1870 it supported a town of nearly 5,000 people a wild and lawless place X Hollywood actress Jodie Stewart still lives in this ghost town this was an extremely violent town there was a murder a week in Cerro Gordo there are 600 people buried up on the hillside the hanging tree is laying down Canyon we have one building the Belle Shaw house that has 156 bullet holes in the living room floor and Jodie knows how they got there dance at night you would hear a little dancehall music and some gunfire and you would hear Rock hammers and drills striking into the Hard Rock and probably an occasional black powder explosion is somebody shot around the atmosphere here was fairly Dante asked at first it was I think a small mining camp but then with investment came the large smelters I've read accounts where they called Cerro Gordo which means fat Hill they called it old smoky the smelters were belching smoke 24 hours a day there were at least two large ones that were burning several quarts a day I guess probably maybe 1012 cords a day if I had lungs I would be coughing a throat I would be parched if I had highs they would be stinging flesh it would be scorched sulfur smoke and cinders enfold me like a shroud there is no silver lining only poison in this cloud the smoke was a byproduct of the extraction of molten silver from the ore at its height the mine yielded 2,000 tons of silver a year frating silver bars and was always a problem and at one time the production from the hill was so great that between eighteen and thirty thousand of these 83 pound bars stacked up waited shipment by wagon and workers were stacking the bars like bricks and stretching canvas over the top and living in them so they were really living in silver houses but success for the human spelled disaster from Bristlecone [Music] [Music] water was needed to fuel the smelters to shore up mine shafts to build houses for miles around you the hills were stripped badly the air filled with the silent chemical screams of dying trees your defenses were triggered when Bristlecone skin is broken the needles release evil-smelling chemicals called terpenoids these are highly effective against insect attack but useless against axes and saws [Music] you are not the only victims the Paiute Indians suffered a similar fate ranchers moved cattle into the valleys to feed the miners the cattle at the grass seeds that formed part of the Indians staple died and the miners hunted the long horn sheep almost to extinction the Indian Way of life could no longer be sustained [Music] [Music] the Paiute Indians who had lived alongside you for over a thousand years were swept from the bellies within half a decade yet these mining towns were never more than a flash in the pan the town of rhyolite boomed for seven years boasting banks swimming pools and even an opera house then when the silver ran out the town went bust and the desert reclaimed the streets the metal the drove men mad is bad for you too when your roots reach out in search of water and nutrients they absorb dissolved silver but you've learned how to deal with this poison by filtering out the silver molecules and depositing them inside your cells when your cells get old and die resin surrounds them sealing the toxic contents forever within your trunk the problem for you Methuselah isn't silver but water you live in one of the driest places on earth you can only quench your thirst to join the six weeks of the year when the winter snow melts around your roots you've adapted well to your limited supply [Music] why waste energy on frivolous growth when one set of needles can last 40 years the design of your needles minimizes water loss specially recessed pores ensure that no precious moisture is lost the pores remain shut most of the time unlike those of other trees which use and lose gallons a day [Music] in the desert every drop of water counts except it seems in Las Vegas water water everywhere and not a drop to think that down their battery trees like plumped up turkeys stand proud in vain bloated and unaware that they are but a switches throw away from death water water and none for ever for 24 hours a day fountains play spraying graffiti that mocks a desert kept at bay [Music] how profligate we must seem to you when a golf course consumes a million gallons a day whereas you can get by on a hundred gallons a year [Music] [Applause] in Las Vegas humans regard the conspicuous display of water as a sign of luxury one hotel has 200 foot high fountains there's even a fake Lake Como [Music] though they live on the dry spot in America LasVegas use more water than anyone else in the world are staggering 300 gallons per person per day [Music] Las Vegas is booming it's the fastest-growing city in America each year 60,000 people move here and 15,000 new houses are built street maps are out of date even before they're printed what you see before you is a display of human power of the nature but nature has a way of saying enough after the pride there comes the fall after the booms of bust remember a man that thou art dust and unto dust 60 miles from Las Vegas was a town specifically designed to boom and bust they called it doom town [Music] so Methuselah you survived the Bronze Age the Iron Age even the Machine Age but how do you do fur in the nuclear age [Music] you [Music] [Music] we were on the brink of the apocalypse the culmination of half a century of human tinkering with the nature of matter [Music] Oh [Music] [Music] 19:57 was a strange year whilst edmond Shulman and his colleagues were collecting data from the bristlecones around you a hundred miles away the atom bomb was being tested in the desert below these bomb tests would come off early in the morning and a number of people would walk up to a height where we could see the flash of the bomb [Music] and when I look back on it now it was remarkable how we were just sort of almost oblivious to the - anything like radioactive fallout it was a big event and and there was a shock I mean we'd see the glow and the earth would shake I mean it was like a definite boom it was something almost of a lark event to just see this I mean just this manifestation of what the human being could do it was a scientific achievement a hundred and thirty miles east of this achievement was a Mormon town called San Jorge it lay directly downwind of the bomb agatha Mannering was in her garden and was given no warning of what was to come she became a human guinea pig when that went off I was lifted off in the ground it just came and hit me up through my feet when I could see this gray cloud rolling in just rolling in and I just stood there and watched it if I'd have had any sense I would have run and hid in the closet or something but this cloud just rolled in there and I stood there and and I smelled it it had a horrible nasty smell I began to feel bad my throat began to burn my sinuses began to burn and my heads became prickly like ants was stinging the top of my head but now I always would bathe but this night I felt too bad too that's the first time I can remember a feeling so bad I didn't want to even bother bathing and that's a one time in my life I needed you and I've had a pile of cancers over my face and body now I'm a genealogist and I know what my forefathers died from way back and none of them ever had cancer but all of this generation has had cancer you know that so many of the people died there was one or two blocks in st. George that there wasn't a house on that block mclubbe someone died of cancer [Music] you were lucky to be upwind of the test site that's how you escaped so lightly with only a trace of strontium 90 in your rings but for scientists like Edmond Shulman the 1950s remained a golden age of innocence and aspiration he spent three glorious summers in Bristlecone country coring a thousand trees his aim was to construct complete weather record of Western America he was your greatest fan and never ceased to marvel at your triumph over adversity struggling with a failing heart in a thin air of the mountains he came to wonder almost fancifully if trees like you held the secret of living forever he was facing his own mortality and obviously had difficulty with breathing at all and this is why I was working with him and so one surprising bit of conversation which came up several times in the several weeks that I was with him is that he would say that somehow he would hope that he used the term elixir that some substance could be distilled from these old trees that the human being could it somehow absorb and then would be a factor in longevity in human beings that the tree could impart its adaptation to adversity to the human being it seemed to me out of place with the rest of his work here he was the very careful scientific method of this extreme care and Counting rings analyzing everything that he said here and then branching off into this other it struck me as a that definitely that he had left the science behind ironically in attributing bristlecones with such supernatural qualities Shulman may being closer to the truth for me realized in 1972 we came up and visited the Shulman Grove here and we walked down and saw Methuselah and noticed that it had a single cone on it so it suddenly struck us that it would be interesting to find out of a tree that ancient a tree that was almost 5,000 years old would be able to produce viable seedlings of viable seeds so we made arrangement to collect the single cone and we extracted the seed there were 96 seeds and we planted the seeds in our nursery one hundred percent germination which for us was absolutely astounding and they were all healthy seedlings also the genetic material contained within your seeds is perfectly preserved our cells are programmed to die yours seem to go on forever [Music] when scientists compared your tissue with much-younger bristlecones they found no signs of deterioration despite the 4,000 year age difference it was very unusual that was astounding to us because there's no indication that there's a built-in senility to the tree Methuselah could live forever there's there's no indication that it can't it's very robust sexually and it seems to be growing healthily although very slowly and each year it puts on an incremental growth both height and diameter but it's a it's a perfectly healthy vigorous tree so at least theoretically Methuselah could live forever what's your seniors is it your Spartan existence a slow metabolism guaranteeing your place in the never-never-land perhaps one day by studying your most personal chemistry scientists may unravel the elixir of life [Music] in 1958 the man who became so intrigued by your longevity succumbed to human frailty Sherman died at the age of 49 [Music] a memorial service was held in the shadow of your branches [Music] [Applause] [Music] since then other scientists working with bristlecones have died prematurely is this a curse Methuselah revenge for Sherman's final gift to the world he wrote an article for the National Geographic celebrating the prison code so that others could share the wonder of these trees but his gesture backfired tourists swarmed at the mountains to try and find you they marveled at the idea of the oldest of living things they liked you so much they talked bits off for souvenirs others were driven by more serious intent what I was turning graduate school my mother sent me an issue of the National Geographic that had a major article in it by Edmund Schulman and this was fascinating I've never heard of Bristlecone pine and so I was on the lookout for them and I began to see them as I was doing some graduate research in the Rocky Mountains and then out into the Great Basin Bristlecone Pines are out there and it was a kind of a sense of discovery well here's another mountain range with Bristlecone Pines I wonder how old they are I wonder what they can tell us Tom Curie was a geography student and the article made him realize that bristlecones might help him date glacial deposits in Nevada [Music] on the crest of a glacial moraine are particularly old and gristle specimen caught his eye by pure chance he chosen a tree that would turn out to be even older than you but he was faced with a problem the normal approach to coring the tree wasn't working because the largest available increment bores were too small to core even from several angles not having the experience to know what to do next Curie took a more direct course of action [Music] so we cut the tree down and captured from the tree a thick cross-section about a foot thick he took the slab back to his motel room and started to count the rings we could begin to see that we were getting over 4,000 years over 4,500 over 4,600 which was the oldest record that had been reported in the literature up until that time and we ended around 4900 years and you've got to think I've got to have done something wrong I better recount I better recount again I better look really carefully with higher magnification [Music] it was only then that the full horror of what he had done began to dawn on him he discovered the world's oldest living thing and killed it [Music] fate had dealt a cruel blow the tree that ended up being cut was literally the first old tree that we climbed to on the crest of the lateral moraine five minutes of looking is all that was involved [Music] fate had one last hand to deal the victim of Curry's chainsaw [Music] the slab was laid to rest in the casino of the small town it once looked down [Music] men dropped to the earth like leaves lives as brief as footprints in snow bristlecones enthroned on top of the world watch civilizations come and go they seek our secret immortality but search in vain for it is vanity if truth be known I would rather be a flower or a leaf that lives and breathes with brief intensity my life is as thin as the wind and I am done with counting stars on the side of this mountain I might live forever could you imagine anything worse my name is Methuselah and this is my curse [Music] when Schulman died he left quite a few samples that he never had a chance to examine and a number of years after his death I went through dating many of these samples and I discovered that out on these slopes there is a tree older than Methuselah and in order to protect this tree I am not telling anyone which tree it is anonymity is its absolute best defense [Music] you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 1,903,771

Rating: 4.5167685 out of 5

Keywords: oldest tree in the world, history documentary, oldest tree, methuselah tree, bristlecone pine, the oldest tree in the world, world oldest tree, nature documentary, biggest tree in the world, ancient trees, tree documentary, timeline documentary, world's oldest tree, channel 4 documentary, oldest trees on earth, documentary history, full documentary, documentary movies - topic, full length documentaries, bbc documentary

Id: 3Ap4Efp7pBs

Length: 50min 9sec (3009 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 01 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/ForbiddenText]

specially-commissioned poetry

You don't hear that everyday

[u/[deleted]]

In 2013, Methuselah was superseded by another bristlecone pine in the same area that was around 5,000 years old.

[u/TearofLyys]

Methuselah isn’t the oldest living thing on earth

[u/Pookypoo]

wasnt there another tree that was near 10,000 or so, well a tad diff. but Old Tjikko

[u/[deleted]]

Couple things,

• It annoyed me that during their timeline they passed dates before their numerical countdown animation could reach them.

• "Longevity", would the trees be so kind after our very human personal abuse.

• At around 43:15 there was a group of people struggling with a piano, with what I can only assume as their desire to bring it atop the hill for a scientists funeral...this was agonizing to watch.

• aside from all of this, it is an interesting attempt at making Trees relevant to story telling and poetry. Bravo, I guess...I mean..i could not do better.

I did this, watched the whole thing, for you the viewer. Now that Karma....that karma must be paid in full. Or ignore me, I very well should be on r/drunk.