Meet Adonis, Europe’s oldest living inhabitant

High in the Pindos mountains in northern Greece sits the oldest known living tree in Europe, believed to be more than 1075 years old, according to scientists.

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.

Other trees in Europe have larger numbers attached to them, such as the Llangernyw Yew in Wales or Scotland’s Fortingall Yew, which is thought to be around 2,000 to 3,000 years old. In Old Tjikko’s case, this means that the spruce tree’s trunk is actually only a few hundred years old, but after each trunk dies, “a new one emerges from the same root stock”, Swedish ecology professor Leif Kullman told National Geographic.

“The tree we have stumbled across is a unique individual”, said Stockholm University graduate student Paul J. Krusic, part of the expedition that found the tree. It also lacks the ability to split or clone itself but still has managed to survive on its own for such a long time.

“Cloning is a very effective evolutionary survival strategy”, said Mr. Krusic. It’s cool, but it’s not the same.

European history has had one continuous observer for more than a thousand years: a pine tree in Greece. The United States is full of different trees whose ages have been confirmed in the thousands, but before this Bosnian pine was found the oldest ever discovered in Europe was barely a millennium. “Fortunately, this forest has been basically untouched for over a thousand years” Krusic added.

1041 – Adonis is a 100 years old. The researchers explained that they extracted cores from the tree to count growth rings, a process that does not endanger the organism. 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. “They looked an terrible lot like trees I’d seen along the Great Basin in the US, which are very old”. “They lived in nearly a similar environment, very rocky, semiarid, so they had all of the hallmarks one would expect for an old tree”, he says. “The core is one meter and has 1,075 annual rings”, he said.

Some of the tree rings were uncounted, as Krusic says they didn’t reach the center.

Current methods allow a complete core to be taken without compromising the tree’s health.

“So it’s definitely older”, he said. “We’re just reporting the actual ring count”. The title of oldest known non-clonal tree in the world goes to a bristlecone pine called Methuselah in California that’s around 4,800 years old. Krusic says the awesome thing is these ancient pines have survived in an area that is busy, compared to the old trees in the USA that are basically in the middle of nowhere. Krusic was impressed by the fact that these broad and complex trees managed to survive in a relatively busy area that has been inhabited for over 3000 years.