Dark-red cones with green leaves provide irrefutable evidence that bristlecone pines are celebrating the miracle of life yet another year. This event, the equivalent of a woman thousands of years old giving birth, confounds the claim that an organism's life-span is limited due to progressive shortening of its DNA telomeres. Gnarled and bent, bristlecone pines are the world's oldest living organisms. Their life-experiences stretch back through millennia similar to those of author J.R.R. Tolkien's Ents - an ancient race of tree-like forest beings. Bristlecone tree rings offer a 6,700-year record of the earth's climate, catastrophic events, and, by extension, the resulting human condition. When dendrochronologists consulted these silent record-keepers in the 1960s, they discovered a startling fact. The megalithic civilizations of prehistoric Europe were thousands of years older than they thought - older in fact than Egyptian pyramids or Greek temples. The carbon 14-dating process contained an erroneous assumption - that amounts of atmospheric radioactivity remain constant. The tree-rings reveal a different story: radioactivity increases the further back one goes beyond 1000 B.C.E.
Related Record from CAplus
146: 180921 Analysis of Telomere Length and Telomerase Activity in Tree Species of Various Lifespans, and with Age in the Bristlecone Pine Pinus longaeva. Flanary, Barry E.; Kletetschka, Gunther. Department of Neuroscience, McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, FL, USA. Rejuvenation Research 2006, 9(1), 61-63 (Eng). Normal somatic cells have a finite replicative capacity, and with each cell division telomeres progressively shorten, unless the telomerase enzyme is present. The bristlecone pine, Pinus longaeva, is the oldest known living eukaryotic organism, with the oldest on record turning 4770 years old in 2005. The results from our study of telomere length and telomerase activity in samples (needle, root, core) from P. longaeva with age, and in other tree species of various lifespans, support the hypothesis that both increased telomere length and telomerase activity may contribute to the increased lifespan and longevity evident in long-lived pine trees (i.e., 2000- to 5000-yr lifespan) compared with medium-lived (400- to 500-yr lifespan) and short-lived (100- to 200-yr lifespan) pine trees, as well as in P. longaeva with age.
75: 142993 Carbon-14 and the prehistory of Europe. Renfrew, Colin. Univ. Sheffield, Sheffield, UK. Scientific American 1971, 225(4), 63-70, 72 (Eng). 14C dating produced some anomalies. Early dates for the megalithic tombs in western Europe were ~2500 B.C. Sites related to the Vinca culture were ~4000 B.C. Egyptian objects dated between 3000 and 2000 B.C., yielded dates that placed them centuries later. The divergence between 14C and tree-ring dates is not serious after 1500 B.C. Differences become larger by 2500 B.C. (+/- 700 yr). Revision of 14C dates for prehistoric Europe has an effect on the diffusionist chronol. Tree-ring calibration transforms the picture of what happened in prehistoric Europe and how Europe developed. Initial impact of 14C dating will lead archeologists to revise their dates for prehistoric Europe.
101: 150905 The atmospheric carbon-14 level in the 7th millennium BC. Bruns, M.; Rhein, M.; Linick, T. W.; Suess, H. E. Inst. Umweltphys., Univ. Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Fed. Rep. Ger. PACT (Athens, Greece) 1983, 8 511-16 (Eng). Atm. 14C levels in the 7th millennium B.C. are calcd. based on 14C dating of Bristlecone pine tree rings. Nonrandom variations in 14C levels were obsd., with temporary increases being obsd. at intervals of ~1000 and 2300 yr during periods of the little ice ages.
82: 124127 Twenty-five years of radiocarbon dating. Ralph, Elizabeth K.; Michael, Henry N. Mus. Appl. Sci. Cent. Archaeol., Univ. Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. American Scientist 1974, 62(5), 553-60 (Eng). Data from radiocarbon (14C) dating were corrected using dendro-data obtained from tree-rings in bristle cone pines...
Related Structure from CAS REGISTRY
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Neoxanthin: a carotene pigment of the bristlecone pine
CAS Registry Number: 14660-91-4
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Updated: 1/26/2009 2:23:36 PM
