bristlecone-pine

High in California's White Mountains grows a bristlecone pine that was already a thousand years old when the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid. Named Methuselah, it has been alive for over 4,850 years — a single organism that has witnessed the entire span of recorded human civilization. And it may not even be the oldest: some trees cheat death by cloning themselves, producing organisms that have lived, in a sense, for tens of thousands of years.