At 13,000 years, tree is world's oldest organismThe Independent: It began life during the last ice age, long before [humans] turned to agriculture and built the first cities in the fertile crescent of the Middle East. It was already thousands of years old when the Egyptians built their pyramids and the ancient Britons erected Stonehenge.
The Jurupa Oak tree first sprouted into life when much of the world was still covered in glaciers. It has stood on its windswept hillside in southern California for at least 13,000 years, making it the oldest known living organism...
Scientists believe the tree, composed of a sprawling community of cloned bushes, is the oldest living thing because it has repeatedly renewed itself to ensure its survival through successive periods of drought, frost, storms and high winds.
The Jurupa oak, named after the Jurupa Hills in California's Riverside County, belongs to a species called Quercus palmeria, or Palmer's Oak. It was this fact that first alerted scientists to the idea that all was not what it seemed when it came to this particular stand of scrubby oak bushes.
'Palmer's Oak normally occurs at much higher elevations, in cooler, wetter climates. In contrast, the Jurupa Oak scrapes by in dry chaparral, wedged between granite boulders and stunted by high winds, atop a small hill in plain sight of suburban backyards,' said Professor Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra of the University of California Davis...
Ring counts show that the Jurupa Oak is growing extremely slowly... The scientists believe the oak began life in a far colder climate during the last ice age, said Andrew Saunders, another member of the team. 'This literally appears to be the last living remnant of a vanished woody vegetation that occupied the inland valleys at the height of the last ice age,' he said.
