Olive trees are common in northern Lebanon, but in the village of Bshaaleh a handful look downright old. Their branches grow in wildly unpredictable directions, and the trees’ gray, gnarled trunks are pierced with holes and crevices large enough to hide a sleeping child. Many people believe that these sentinel trees are thousands of years old. They are known as “Noah trees” because of some people’s belief that the trees are the source of the olive branch carried by the dove back to Noah’s ark.

Scientists have now established a specific age for several Bshaaleh (also spelled Bchaaleh) trees and found that most are around 500 years old. But one, a colossus about 15 feet in diameter, is more than 1,100 years old. That is the oldest olive tree in the world, the team reported last month in the journal Dendrochronologia.

Not many other large olive trees have been reliably dated, despite the cultural, spiritual and economic importance of such trees in places like the Mediterranean. Scientifically determining the age of olive trees is a challenge, says J. Julio Camarero, a dendrochronologist at the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology in Zaragoza, Spain, who led the study of the Bshaaleh trees. That’s because these trees often don’t have regular growth rings, he said. “The rings are not easy to see.”

Most tree species form annual growth rings. Researchers can count the number of rings in wood samples extracted from living specimens and accurately determine the age of a tree. This practice has spawned an entire subfield of scientific research known as dendrochronology. For example, studies based largely on analyzing tree rings have shed light on the timing of the Vikings’ arrival in what is now Newfoundland, and the craftsmanship of Antonio Stradivari, the Italian craftsman known for his stringed instruments.

But olive trees – which scientists have previously shown can live for hundreds of years – often have irregular or even missing annual rings. In addition, older olive trees may exhibit multiple trunks, hollowed interiors and other growth defects that make it difficult to determine their age. Even professional tree ring scientists have difficulty with olive trees: a previous study found that when different tree ring laboratories received samples of wood from the same olive trees, the laboratories reported tree ring numbers that varied by no less than a factor of three.

Given the difficulties associated with counting the rings of olive trees, researchers have tried this infer the ages of olive trees based on their diameters. Such age estimates can be uncertain, however, as soil fertility, climatic conditions and other factors can affect a tree’s growth. “Size is not the same as age,” said Dr. Camarero.

As a result, olive trees are generally under-researched, says Peter M. Brown, director of Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research, who was not involved in the new research. “No one has paid much attention to olives because of the difficulty in conducting proficiency testing with them.”

In 2018, several colleagues of Dr. Camarero to Bshaaleh, about 80 kilometers north of Beirut. With the permission of the village leaders, the researchers cut wood samples from eleven olive trees. The team would not count tree rings, so there was no need to continuously take a sample of wood, from the center of each tree to the bark. Instead, the researchers planned to use carbon-14 dating to assess the oldest wood from each tree.

But even collecting just the inner — and believed to be oldest — wood from the trees was a challenge, said Ramzi Touchan, an environmental scientist at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, who led the sampling effort. In many cases, the centers of the trees had rotted away over time. “You can’t see the center,” Dr. Touchan said. In other cases, the trees were multi-stemmed and it was unclear where the oldest wood was located. Despite all the uncertainty, Dr. Touchan: “I wasn’t optimistic.”

Back at the University of Arizona, researchers extracted the carbon from each of the roughly half-centimeter samples. By comparing the relative abundance of two isotopes of carbon – carbon-12 and radioactive carbon-14 – the team concluded how much time had passed since that wood formed. Dr. Camarero and his collaborators obtained reliable age estimates for four trees: three were probably between 500 and 700 years old, and one was about 1,100 years old.

Those ages make sense, says Concepción Muñoz Díez, an agricultural engineer at the University of Cordoba in Spain, who was not involved in the study.

But it’s important to consider that Bshaaleh’s olive trees may have grown by attaching part of a tree to an existing root system, said Dr. Muñoz Díez.

“They don’t know if the trees have been grafted.”

The researchers may have accidentally collected wood from that older rootstock, said Dr. Muñoz Díez, a possibility considering that a grafted tree can grow a mixture of both rootstock and cultivar wood. In such a case, the established ages would be an overestimate, she said.

Although Dr. Camarero and his team couldn’t rule out the possibility that the trees had been grafted, he said the opposite conclusion could also be drawn: The ages he and his team recovered could also be an underestimate if the samples came from the cultivar wood. .

Whatever their actual age, the olive trees are living treasures for the people of Bshaaleh.

“They represent the cultural heritage of the residents of Bshaaleh and serve as a source of pride and a symbol of local identity,” said Rachid Geagea, owner and caretaker of one of the trees and former mayor of Bshaaleh.

Every fall, he said, village residents gather near the trees to harvest that year’s fruit. By hand or with devices that resemble fluttering rakes, the villagers collect hundreds of kilos of green- and purple-tinged olives. Some of that fruit is saved to be eaten, and some is pressed into oil.

People are sometimes disappointed when trees don’t turn out to be as old as expected, says Mauro Bernabei, a dendrochronologist at Italy’s National Research Council who was not involved in the study. “It’s almost automatic that when you see these kinds of majestic trees, you say they are millennial.”

But assigning an age to a tree doesn’t change its value, said Dr. Muñoz Díez. “For those of us who already know, cherish and love them, age is a small detail.”

Rachelle Alwan contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.

For a brief time in the mid-1800s, one of the largest cities in California was a place you may not have heard of: Marysville, about 40 miles north of Sacramento.

Marysville was a gold rush town, which in 1860 was more populous than any other city in the state except San Francisco and Sacramento. The community, in Yuba County, was the last stop along the way for gold seekers who had come to California by steamship and headed inland to the mines.

It was also home to the state’s third-largest Chinatown, a hub for immigrants from southern Guangdong province who worked on the railways.

“I grew up hearing Marysville as Sahm Fow,” or “third city” in Cantonese, said Jon Lim, a 54-year-old resident of the city.

Today, Marysville is a quiet town with antique shops and Victorian homes, and a population that is only 7 percent Asian. Yet the legacy of the once vibrant Chinatown remains.

Built in 1880 in the center of Marysville’s Chinatown, the Bok Kai Temple has been preserved as one of the oldest Taoist temples in the United States. The temple, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, honors the water god Bok Eye, to whom locals prayed for enough rain to grow crops, but not so much that their homes would be flooded. Marysville is located at the confluence of the Yuba and Feather rivers, and its Chinese residents were banished to the lowest, most flood-prone parts.

I stopped at the temple recently and went through imposing red doors into a shrine where the air was cool and smelled of incense. An ornate wooden altar containing copper statues of gods, decorated with peacock feathers and red ribbons.

Under the eaves of the temple were surprisingly well-preserved murals from almost 150 years ago, depicting Chinese scenes. They were hidden from view for decades by layers of incense smoke, which appeared to have protected them from the elements, said Lim, president of the nonprofit Marysville Chinese Community, which owns the temple.

Lim told me that Bok Kai was built to replace previous temples in Marysville that had been destroyed by fire and vandalism. His family, who have lived in the region since the 1860s, believe the current temple has survived so long in part because the surrounding community was more tolerant of Chinese immigrants than people in other parts of the state.

(Bok Kai is not the oldest Chinese temple in California; there is one temple from 1863 in nearby Oroville and one from 1874 in Weaverville, another gold rush town, further north in Trinity County.)

Bok Kai’s great iron gates now hug a sand dike that keeps the Yuba River at bay, and the temple sits on a deserted street next to the Silver Dollar Saloon, a former brothel. With Marysville’s Chinese population now a fraction of what it once was, the temple is generally open by appointment only, with the exception of one weekend a year, which takes place next month.

The 144th annual Bok Kai Festival, billed as the longest-running parade in California, is scheduled for March 8-10. Visitors can tour the temple, watch traditional lion dances and enjoy a firecracker show. The festival celebrates Bok Eye’s birthday, which falls on the second day of the second month of the traditional Chinese calendar.

Lim told me he was trying to revive interest in the festival despite the city’s dwindling Chinese population. He hopes to keep this up for as long as possible.

“If I don’t do it, my kids won’t have it,” he said.

Tell us

What are the best movies from California? “Chinatown”? “Fear of heights”? “La La Land”?

Tell us which movie you would put on a California movie list and why. Email us at CAtoday@nytimes.com. Please include your full name and the city where you live.

And before you go: good news

A Los Gatos man, Mark Zhang, has lent portable generators to his neighbors in the South Bay who lost power this winter, including during recent heavy rains. Mercury News reports this.

His effort began a year ago, in January 2023, when Los Gatos experienced major outages after a major storm. Zhang, who is passionate about preparedness and had amassed a collection of used generators, was out of the country. But with the help of a city council member, he was able to lend his generators to neighbors who had no lights.

The generators made such a difference that Zhang decided to formalize the operation this year, giving classes to the community on how to set up the machines and teaching the city’s Community Emergency Response Team, of which he is now a member, to to use.

Zhang said he hoped to create a generator sharing program for South Bay residents to ensure the community is as prepared and resilient as possible.

The platypus, a unique egg-laying mammal native to Australia, faces many threats in the wild: climate change, predators, pollution, flooding and shrinking freshwater habitats. For males, mating is a dangerous affair, injuring each other with their sharp, poisonous spurs.

But scientists recently identified a male platypus that was just under 24 years old, the oldest recorded age for a platypus living in the wild, in an area that had experienced nearly seven years of drought during its lifetime. The discovery offers rare insight into one of the world's most mysterious creatures and tips on how to help them live longer.

“We're now getting a better idea of ​​how they can live to a reasonable age when conditions are right,” said Geoff Williams, a biologist with the Australian Platypus Conservancy who helped study the platypus before bringing it home.

The platypus is fast, slippery and declining in numbers and difficult to study. About 300,000 of these animals still live in eastern Australia and Tasmania. Special equipment is needed to analyze and catalog them. The males' venom can cause people months of pain.

The age of an adult platypus is difficult to say. When platypuses are young, changes to their bodies are more noticeable, allowing scientists to estimate what stage of development they are in. Once they reach adulthood, they hardly change at all.

Scientists knew the age of the platypus they found in a small creek near Melbourne in September because they had already tagged it in November 2000, when they determined it was about 12 and a half months old, according to a published paper. in this week Australian Mammalogy.

Platypuses have lived longer in captivity. The oldest known platypus recently turned 30 at a zoo in rural Victoria. But in old age it developed arthritis in one wrist, cataracts in both eyes and deafness — signs of aging that “might have precluded her survival had she lived in the wild,” the study authors wrote.

Scientists say the discovery of the oldest known wild platypus, which broke a record previously held by a female last seen in New South Wales at the age of 21, could help preserve the species. In particular, studying its habitat, Monbulk Creek, provided some clues for conservationists.

One of the keys to the platypus's long-term survival was a pool of water that persisted throughout the seven-year drought, Williams said in an interview. The platypus lived near an artificial reservoir that had supplied water to a local community in Melbourne's south-eastern suburbs about a hundred years ago, providing a refuge during long dry spells.

Conservation groups could help other members of the species by identifying and strengthening populations near similar pools that are deep and large enough to hold water during droughts, he added.

“It's important to make sure the population is still alive,” says Gemma Snowball, a zoologist at Ecology Australia, an ecological consultancy that helped identify the platypus, “so that everyone can see them and see that the iconic Australian species is still alive. in the wild.”

Scientists also said the area's low population density could have helped the platypus survive. A higher density could have led to more breeding and foraging activity, causing the animal to leave the water more often and risk predation, Ms Snowball said. The male could also have taken more risks by fighting over or defending a female.

In addition to its habitat, the animal itself also provided exciting new information for scientists about the landmark species.

Over its lifetime, the platypus' spurs had worn down to half its length, from 19 to 9.5 millimeters, Williams said. The observation opened the possibility that scientists could use that feature to measure the age of adult platypuses in the future.

“That's something we haven't been able to confirm for a long period of time,” he said, adding: “If we could get a few more shots like this, we could start to estimate what kind of decline is happening.” takes place over time. .”

For Mr Williams, the discovery was also a sign that the endangered species could be more resilient than scientists had feared. In Monbulk Creek, “platypuses are highly endangered,” he said. “They could become extinct at any moment.” Yet an animal survived there for a long time and remained sexually competitive.

“It gives us much more hope,” he said, “that even if climate change predictions are correct, if Australia becomes a lot drier in some places and platypus populations face the prospect of living in isolated areas for much longer. areas they can survive for quite long periods of time when they are under pressure.”

In the stark inland desert of Argentina's Patagonia lies a remote cave decorated with nearly 900 paintings of human figures, animals and abstract designs. Until recently, archaeologists assumed that the petroglyphs at this site, known as Cueva Huenul 1, were created within the past few thousand years.

But in an article published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, archaeologists say that one of the cave's most mysterious motifs, a comb-like pattern, first appeared some 8,200 years ago, making it by far the earliest known example of rock art at one of the last sites on Earth. earth that are still inhabited. by our kind. Cave artists continued to draw the same comb design in black pigment for thousands of years, an era when other human activities were virtually absent from the site. The cave art offers a rare glimpse into a culture that may have relied on this design to communicate valuable insights across generations during a period of climactic shifts.

“We got the results and we were very surprised,” said Guadalupe Romero Villanueva, author of the study and archaeologist at the Argentine government agency CONICET and the National Institute of Anthropology and Latin American Thought in Buenos Aires. “It was a shock and we had to rethink some things.”

Patagonia, which stretches across the southernmost tip of South America, was only reached by humans about 12,000 years ago. These early residents thrived at Cueva Huenul 1 for generations, leaving behind signs of habitation.

About 10,000 years ago the area became drier and more hostile due to climate changes. The archaeological evidence in the cave also dried up over the next several thousand years, indicating that the site was largely abandoned due to environmental pressures.

The crest motifs overlap with this long period of hardship, according to Dr. Romero Villanueva and her colleagues, who identified the age of the paintings with radiocarbon dating. The team also found that the black paint was likely made from charred wood, possibly from burned bushes or cacti.

“As interesting as the eras are, for us it is much more important that they cover more or less 3,000 years of painting, basically the same motif, during all this time,” says Ramiro Barberena, author of the study and archaeologist also at CONICET. in Argentina and Temuco Catholic University in Chile.

He added that this was evidence “of continuity in the transmission of information in these very small and highly mobile societies.”

Although the significance of the crest motif has been lost to time, the researchers speculate that it may have helped preserve the collective memories and oral traditions of peoples who endured this unusually hot and dry period.

The relationships between groups of ancient people who developed and shared such rock art may have increased the chances of survival in this challenging environment, said Dr. Barberena.

Andrés Troncoso, an archaeologist at the University of Chile's anthropology department who was not involved in the study, said he agreed with that interpretation. The article “contributes to the discussion about how people have dealt with climate change in the past,” he said.

Although the purpose of the crest motif will likely remain a mystery, the motif's continued presence in the cave opens a new window into the prehistoric peoples of Patagonia.

“You can't help but think about these people,” said Dr. Romero Villanueva, adding: “They were in the same place, admiring the same landscape; the people who lived here, perhaps families, gathered here for social aspects. It is very emotional for us.”

Edith Ceccarelli, dressed in pearl earrings and a silk scarf, rested in an easy chair next to her birthday cake, decorated with the number 116.

What could otherwise have been a quiet birthday gathering on Sunday morning was instead a grand celebration of the oldest known person in America. Before a parade of a hundred vehicles decorated with balloons and streamers arrived outside the nursing home where Ceccarelli lives, I joined a group of reporters and photographers who sang to her and wished her a happy birthday.

Mayor Saprina Rodriguez of Willits, the small town in Mendocino County where Ceccarelli (formerly Recagno) lived most of her life, read a proclamation: “1908 was the year we got the Ford Model T. Theodore Roosevelt became president. And Edith Recagno was born: three timeless American classics.”

Read my article about Ceccarelli, including her advice for living that long.

Robert Young of the Gerontology Research Group, a Los Angeles-based organization that studies supercentenarians (people who live to 110), told me that Ceccarelli was the 29th recorded person to live to 116. Her contemporaries, if alive, would be Lyndon. B. Johnson, Lucille Ball and Mother Teresa.

What advice does Young offer for living until you're 110? “No. 1: Be a woman.” Of the 45 Oldest People Now Living Worldwidehe noted, 43 are women.

What about things that are within one's control? “Stay physically active,” he said. “Run fast. Be a self-directed individual.”

Ceccarelli was lively and fit well into his 100s. She regularly walked through the city in a stylish outfit and danced in the senior center. At age 101, she wore a floppy, fringed hat and rode down Main Street in Willits in the back of a Porsche convertible as honorary grand marshal of the city's Fourth of July parade.

Young said that extremely long life generally comes from a combination of lucky genes (Ceccarelli's parents lived in their early 90s) and good habits, including staying social, having a daily routine and getting enough sleep. He met Ceccarelli last year when he took her blood for a biobank that researchers hope will yield more insights into why some people live very long lives.

Many of the world's oldest people live in a Mediterranean climate like California's; Young speculated that they may be easier on the body than places with harsher weather.

Ceccarelli, who lived her entire life in Northern California, is now considered the second-oldest person in the world; the eldest lives in Spain, but was born in San Francisco in 1907.

“I think it's time for California to shine; it's your day in the sun,” Young told me.

Ceccarelli now has progressive dementia, so she moves in and out of lucidity. But on the morning of the parade, she seemed happy to know we were all there to celebrate her. She tasted her carrot cake. She shared a hug with Evelyn Persico, 84, her second cousin by marriage and one of her closest living relatives.

“She's so beautiful – what happened to her wrinkles?” Persico, who said she has long considered Ceccarelli a mother figure, joked during the meeting. “I have more wrinkles than her!”

I've realized that I like writing about long-lived Californians:

And before you go: good news

Los Angeles is well-stocked with famous works of art and notable architecture, and TimeOut recently compiled a list of 21 museums in the city that it considers essential for residents and visitors. They are all free or offer free entry on some days.

These include the Huntington Library, the Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, whose pristine gardens are as much a delight as the art collection, and the 1921 Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Hollyhock House, perched on a hill in Barnsdall Park in Los Angeles. Feliz.