Now here is this cool dude called Adonis, who lives in the highlands of northern Greece. He is 1,075 years old, maybe the oldest living inhabitant in Europe.
He is a Bosnian pine who was discovered by scientists from Stockholm University, the University of Mainz and the University of Arizona.
Adonis can claim to have lived during the Byzantine Empire, as well as the Ottoman empire. He was just 100 years old when Macbeth was crowned King of Scotland and was 750 years old when Isaac Newton created his laws of motion.
"This little pine, nicknamed "Adonis," has seen world wars, a century of revolutions, the Protestant Reformation, the Crusades, and a good chunk of the Dark Ages," explains csmonitor.
"The tree we have stumbled across is a unique individual," said Stockholm University graduate student Paul J. Krusic. "It cannot rely on a mother plant, or the ability to split or clone itself, to survive."
This tree belongs to an elite club of a dozen trees that are each a millennium old. They are located in a forest high in the Pindos mountains, adjacent to the Greek border with Albania.
To gauge the age, the experts took a core of his wood measuring a meter in diameter, and discovered that this is the oldest known living tree in Europe, when the scientists counted the annual rings.
However, Adonis is not the oldest in the world. That honour belongs to a bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of California that is more than 5,000 years old.
"It is quite remarkable that this large, complex and impressive organism has survived so long in such an inhospitable environment, in a land that has been civilized for over 3,000 years," said dendrochronologist Paul J. Krusic, who led the expedition.
The rings on the tree don't merely give information about his age, but even about the climatic and environmental conditions during the ancient eras.
