Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2016 May 26

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May 26

Have trees in the Garden of Gethsemane been dated?

The oldest ones are from about the time of Jesus. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 22:18, 26 May 2016 (UTC)

According to the wikipedia article Gethsemane, the trees have been dated and the oldest are from the 11th century. CodeTalker (talk) 00:27, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

Though they come from the same parent plant and the dates given for each tree are within a few years of Crusades. I can imagine pilgrims taking relics/souvenirs from the parent plant and someone having to replant it. But yeah, the trees that are there now do not date back to the time of Jesus. Ian.thomson (talk) 01:08, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

So beliefs like this might be BS then. Or maybe they didn't date the oldest tree. That might be the case if you could confuse a 2 millennia old olive tree for a 900 year old one by sight. Supposedly, the oldest olive trees in the world are 4-5 and 3 millennia old. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:48, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

There's a ship of theseus problem here too. You can date a given ramet of an aspen, but aging the clonal colony is truckier. See e.g. Pando_(tree) for a very very old organism. It is estimated to be at least 80k years old, but some experts think it's closer to one million years old! But probably no part of which is older than a few thousand years. Olives are a little different of course but it's entirely plausible that the 11th century trees were continually cloned from Jesus' time. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:15, 27 May 2016 (UTC)