A Bosnian pine in the highlands of northern Greece dates back to over a thousand years ago, making it Europe’s oldest living inhabitant.
Back in the 940s, Constantinople — what is now Istanbul — was the supreme city, the Vikings were ruling the seas, and King Arthur may or may not have been a real historical figure in Britain. During this time, a sapling was planted and would eventually go on to become the tree named Adonis, the Washington Post reports.
Scientists date the pine, scientific name Pinus heldreichii, to be 1,075 years old, making it not only the oldest tree in Europe but the oldest living thing.
While there are many older trees in Europe that are up to tens of thousands years old, those are clonal, meaning they have reproduced asexually repeatedly throughout the ages. The individual trees are only a few hundred years old, while genetically identical to the much older trees in the same root system.
Paul J. Krusic, a graduate student at Stockholm University and a member of the team that discovered the tree, says Adonis is a “unique individual.” He explains, “It cannot rely on a mother plant, or the ability to split or clone itself, to survive. Cloning is a very effective evolutionary survival strategy. It’s cool, but it’s not the same. It’s not the same as you or I being left alone to our own devices and living for 1,000 years, like this tree.”
There are likewise other trees in Europe estimated to be older than this pine, but those ages have been calculated using size, records, and presumed growth rate. There are plenty of ancient trees thousands of years old in the United States, but rarely in Europe.
Adonis is a pine species that grows one ring for each year it has lived, making calculating its age a certainty. This method of dating using tree rings is called dendrochronology.
Krusic’s interest in the forest where Adonis was found was because of an academic thesis, and not particularly because he wanted to find an old tree. He was using tree dating to gather information on the history of climate change and other environmental factors when he came across a patch of contorted trees in the Grecian forest.
He says that the photographs of the trees reminded him of the trees in the Great Basin. “They lived in almost a similar environment, very rocky, semiarid, so they had all of the hallmarks one would expect for an old tree,” he says.
Krusic and his team from the University of Arizona and the University of Mainz extracted cores from the trees to count their rings. This procedure us safe for the tree, as the samples are only 5 millimeters wide. The scientists counted the rings and compared them with other trees to factor in any abnormalities.
Some of the tree rings were uncounted, as Krusic says they didn’t reach the center. Also, the core was not taken from the base, so it only showed rings that formed when the tree was young and had reached a certain height. “It’s definitely older,” Kusic says. “We’re just reporting the actual ring count.”
The researchers likewise found over a dozen trees surrounding Adonis that were over a thousand years old. Krusic says the amazing thing is these ancient pines have survived in an area that is busy, compared to the old trees in the US that are basically in the middle of nowhere. He believes the trees adapted to survive.
Krusic says Adonis won’t be getting published in any journals, however, as he was just a lucky find. His team’s focus remains on the fallen trees in the forest, which the scientists will continue to study for information on climate change — the real story, as Krusic puts it.
