Some trees are older than the pyramids.
for grown-ups
What we actually know
Yes, though the oldest one alive is a close race. Most trees add one growth ring a year, so counting rings tells you how many years a tree grew. The oldest known are Great Basin bristlecone pines, which grow very slowly on high, dry mountains in the western United States.
The pyramids are about four and a half thousand years old: the Step Pyramid of Djoser, the first, from about 2670 BC, and the Great Pyramid of Giza from about 2560 BC. In 1964 a bristlecone on Wheeler Peak in Nevada, later known as Prometheus, was cut down and its rings counted: 4,862 of them. That tree began growing around 2900 BC, a couple of centuries before the first pyramid.
The oldest living tree is more uncertain, which the round says. A bristlecone called Methuselah, in California's White Mountains, was dated in 1957 to more than 4,600 years. Today's count from the cores on hand is close to 4,700 years, about the age of the pyramids. A core said to show more rings has never been found. Counters don't cut living trees: they take a pencil-thin core with a hollow drill, and the tree lives on.
This is a hard-to-check claim. Nobody playing can count a bristlecone. The move is to check how the counting was done, and the try-it step lets children count rings on any stump or log themselves.
Sources: US National Park Service, Great Basin National Park, "The Prometheus Story" (4,844 rings at first, revised to 4,862 by Donald Graybill); World History Encyclopedia and Discover Magazine (the dates of the pyramids); the Boston Globe, "Why mystery surrounds what may be Earth's oldest tree" (2022), on Methuselah and the missing core. The cutting of Prometheus is still argued about: it helped start the protection of bristlecone pines. The round leaves out who cut it.
What kids usually bring
- "Trees can live a really long time." True, and some live a really long time.
- "Someone told me about super old trees." A fine where-from. The round asks whether the record says the same.
- "Big trees like kauri are really old." Some are over a thousand years old. The pyramids are older, but the bristlecones are older still.
- "The pyramids are thousands of years old." True. So is that tree. Which is older is the question.
- "Trees fall down, or get cut down." Most do. The counted tree was cut down too, after nearly five thousand years.
- "Nothing alive can be that old." A fair guess. Can something that grows very, very slowly?
At dinner
Ask: "How can a tree keep count of its own age?" Find a stump, a round of firewood or a cut log, and count the rings together from the middle out. Then ask: how would you count a tree you weren't allowed to cut?
Then the one rule: say their reason back before you give yours.
The round never tells your child what to think. This card tells you what we know, so you're never caught out. If your child wants to argue with it, that is the point.
