Fact Check: Africa’s baobab tree is not the oldest tree in the world, viral claim is not true

New Delhi (Vishvas News). A picture of a tree is going viral on social media. It is being claimed with this picture that the world’s oldest tree is in Tanzania, Africa, and is more than 6000 years old. Vishvas News found that this claim is fake. The oldest tree ever found in the Great Basin Bristlecone Pine, which is about 5000 years old and is located in the USA.

What’s in the viral post

A picture of a tree is being shared on social media. It is being claimed that the world’s oldest tree is in Tanzania, Africa, and is more than 6000 years old. The description reads, “Oldest tree in the world. 6000 years. Tanzania. Africa.”

See the archive link of this post here.

Investigation

To investigate this post, we took the help of keyword search. Searching with keywords, we found an article at guinnessworldrecords.com. According to this article, the oldest tree in the world was in Nevada, America. According to the article, “A tree was recorded to be about 5,200 years old. This bristlecone pine (Pinus longeva) was cut from Mount Wheeler in Nevada, the USA in 1963. The tree was about 5,200 years old.”

We found another article at guinnessworldrecords.com. According to this, the oldest living tree in the world is in California, USA. According to the article, “The world’s oldest tree is a bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) in White Mountains, California, USA. It was found to be over 4,800 years old (4,852 years as of 2020); this age was later Confirmed by dendrochronologist Tom Harlan (d.2013) in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. This tree is currently the oldest verified living tree in the world.”

According to rmtrr.org also Pinus longeva of America, Great Basin Bristlecone Pine are the oldest trees in the world and are about 5000 years old.

On Google reverse image search of the viral image, we found this image uploaded on January 17, 2013 at flickr.com. According to the information available here, the name of this tree is Baobab tree. By doing a keyword search, we found that the average age of a baobab tree is upto 3000 years.

For more confirmation, we spoke to R Geeta, a retired professor in the Department of Botany, University of Delhi. She told us, “The world’s oldest tree is America’s Pinus longaeva, the Great Basin bristlecone pine, whose oldest recorded age is about 5000 years. The oldest recorded age of baobab trees found in Africa is about 3000 years.”

This post was shared on Facebook by a user named ‘Basavarajaiah Honnagangaiah’. The user has hidden his personal information.