I thought I was old...

This little story in the Independent tweaked my interest today, it's about a Jurupa Oak tree in California that is estimated to be at least 13,000 years old (perhaps older) that's a mind boggling number. This tree was alive at the end of the last ice age and is at least 10,000 years older than the oldest redwood making it probably the oldest living organism on the planet.

People lucky enough to have visited the Natural History museum in London will no doubt have seen the cross section of a 1,400 year old giant sequoia tree (see image above) in the main gallery with its various growth rings labelled with historical events (like the invention of Islam) this exhibit remains one of my favourites as it's a great way of making the time dimension tangible. I love the idea that this little oak tree experienced a world free from Abrahamic religions, in fact it was already thousands of years old when the human hunter gatherers of the fertile crescent of the Middle-East started to adopt farming along with building static communities, towns and cities. As we know, those early farmers went on to develop the now pervasive faith based memes to explain the universe as they saw it and the seeds of the mechanisms to control people using them. I find it thought provoking and somewhat humorous that the seed of this unassuming little plant first germinated some 7,000 years before millions of followers of these three main desert dogma's still insist that their "God" actually created the universe!

...And I thought I was old!