This tree took root about 5400 years ago.. For scale: at the same time, mankind created the most ancient writing, reports Science.

The tree grew in the coastal mountains of modern Chile in a cool, damp ravine.. Here he was not threatened by fires and axes of lumberjacks.

The diameter of the trunk of the oldest living organism on Earth is more than 4 meters. Most of the trunk died, part of the crown fell off, the tree was covered with mosses, lichens and even other trees that took root in its cracks..

Known as Alerce Milenario or Gran Abuelo (great-grandfather), this tree can now lay claim to a new and extraordinary title: the oldest living thing on earth..

Using a combination of computer models and traditional methods of calculating the age of trees, Jonathan Baricivic, a Chilean environmental scientist working at the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory in Paris, has calculated that Alerce Milenario is probably over 5,000 years old.. This made it at least 1 century older than the current record holder: Methuselah, a bristlecone pine in eastern California with 4,853 growth rings..

Alers are in the same botanical family as giant sequoias.. They can grow to a very respectable age, as botanist Antonio Lara of the Southern University of Chile proved in the 1990s.. In a 1993 study, Lara and a colleague reported an alers stump found in southern Chile that had 3,622 growth rings.. This made this species the second oldest on record after the bristlecone pine, ahead of the redwoods..

Baricivic says his grandfather discovered this tree around 1972.. His grandfather and mother worked as caretakers in the park where the ancient tree grows..

In 2020, just before the start of the pandemic, Baricivic and Lara cut out part of Alers Milenario with a T-drill that scientists use to cut narrow cores from trees without harming them.. The core showed approximately 2,400 closely spaced tree rings..

Since the drill could not reach the center of the tree, Baricivic turned to statistical modeling to determine Alers Milenario's full age.. He used core samples from other Alers trees and information about how environmental factors and random variation affect tree growth.. The method gave an overall age estimate of 5484 years with an 80% chance that the tree lived to be over 5000 years old.. “It was amazing,” he says.. I expected the tree to be about 4000 years old”.

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