PBS Airdate: December 11, 2001
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NARRATOR: This tree is the oldest living thing on earth.Nearly 5,000 years old, it is called Methuselah, named after the longest livedof all the biblical patriarchs. Enduring droughts and storms, it was a seedlingwhen the pyramids were built. But this tree is not in Egypt. It grows near LasVegas, on a remote hillside. Methuselah's hidden connections to thousands ofyears of human history are only now being discovered. No one paid muchattention to this living fossil, until one man became obsessed with extractingits secrets. Relentlessly he probed, uncovering clues to our prehistoric past.His discoveries led to a startling idea: that this magnificent tree could holdthe key to immortality itself. But the Methuselah tree has an enemy. Will itsurvive to let us unlock its secrets?
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NARRATOR: Your roots go a long way back, two and a halfthousand years before Christ was born. Twenty-six foot tall and still growing,you are the oldest living thing on earth. Rock solid and transfixed, you'vetaken life slowly, unlike our human race. That's us down there, Las Vegas,glowing in the desert. Are you sad? Are you jealous? If you could speak whatwould you tell us?
METHUSELAH:
Once you had garden of Eden.
Now you have this.
A playpen in the desert. Bliss.
Here, 5,000 years of civilization
Can be experienced in an instant.
Have a nice day. Enjoy.
For in a flash it could all be over.
Kings, emperors, deities,
Craven images cast in plaster, neon lit.
Look on my works,
Ye mighty, and despair.
The smell of money in the air,
A tawdry son-et-lumiere.
Your immortals are mortal, they were once flesh and blood.
Escape the delusion, the noise and pollution
The true immortals are made out of wood.
They call us bristlecone pines.
They call me Methuselah.
NARRATOR: You live in the White Mountains of California, wherethe climate is so harsh little else can survive. It's no surprise you look moredead than alive. Adversity is the secret of your success. You have taughtyourself to thrive in this parched landscape with little food or water. Likewar-time children, brought up on a meager diet, you far outlive your vigorouscousins further down the mountain. Your scrawny bodies atrophy on the outside,while preserving a hidden vitality within. You survive on a lifeline only 10inches wide, a stripe of bark-covered tissue which manages to carry allessential nutrients from your roots to your needles.
The slow pace of life keeps you slim. We humans could take a leaf out ofyour frugal lives. It takes a hundred years to add an inch to your waistline.Could it be that deep within your cells you hold the key toimmortality?
Your secret seemed safe in this rocky wilderness until one day in 1957 ascientist walked into your life. The scientist's name was Edmund Schulman andhe was about to make the most exciting discovery of his life. In the crosssection he removed from your body, he counted over 4,600 rings, eachrepresenting exactly one year of life. By inspecting the width of each ring, hecould tell what kind of a year you'd had and whether the climate had promotedgrowth. Hidden within your trunk was a record of weather and time ofunparalleled age and accuracy. Bristlecones were 1,500 years older than anyother tree previously studied. Having found the oldest tree of all, he namedyou Methuselah.
METHUSELAH:
Methuselah, Methuselah this human
christens me, for he has counted
the candles on my cake... 4,600.
Am celebrity now, and no mistake.
Am named. Am given voice.
The years, like necklaces bestow
a wisdom, humankind can never know.
Millennia, they come and go.
Have no eyes, but have seen it all.
Ancient civilizations that you can
Only read about, Methuselah has sensed.
Am not part of history... No,
history is parts of me.
NARRATOR: Twenty-five-sixty-six B.C., not long after you'dtaken root, the largest stone building in the world is about to be occupied.King Cheops, had built the great pyramid of Giza as a tool for himself. He islying on his deathbed. The Pharaoh exhales for the last time. His breathcontains millions of carbon dioxide molecules. Imagine those molecules of spentbreath cast adrift into the atmosphere. Riding the jet stream, crossing oceansand continents. A few reach a land that would later be called America. Perhapsyou were too young to remember. You were a mere sapling when one entered yourbody through a tiny pore of a needle.
Drawing energy from the sun, you split these molecules asunder. The oxygenis for us, the carbon for you. Your complex chemistry bonds the carbon atomsinto sugar that fuels your growth. And that's how a molecule from a dyingbreath can give life to one of your new cells.
When King Cheops died, you were nine inches tall and only 77 years old.During your first 1,000 years, civilizations in the world beyond comeand go.
Then one day you had your first encounter with humanity. These hunters werePaiute Indians who for 3,000 years followed Longhorn sheep into the WhiteMountains leaving behind evidence of their brief visits.
MICHAEL DELACORTE (California State University): Are you gettingmuch over there?
WOMAN: Not much, just a few flakes.
MICHAEL DELACORTE: Here we go. Well this is a...a naturally occurringvolcanic glass, obsidian, that's extremely abundant in this part of the world.This is a...a volcanically active part of the world. It's very easy to work. Itproduces extremely sharp edges. It's wonderful for us, as well, because it canbe sourced to particular flows and so we can use it to understand where peopleare coming from and where they went. We can reconstruct in quite a bit ofdetail the annual rounds of people at different times in the past by looking atthe sources of obsidian that they...they collected and used.
NARRATOR: From the location of the obsidian lava flowsarchaeologists have established that the Indians would cover a distance of 150miles in the course of a year. In the six weeks of summer when the weatheropened up the mountaintops for hunting they would venture up to your domain.
MICHAEL DELACORTE: Small groups, probably mostly hunters, would come upto these highlands, hunt for a period of maybe a few days or a week, try andget some meat and maybe even dry it or partially dry it and then return down tothe...the valleys where living conditions were a little better. This is anextremely harsh environment. The air is thin. The wind is incessant. It is nota comfortable place to be. Here it is the middle of July and I'm wearing a downvest to give you some idea of just how harsh conditions are.
NARRATOR: One summer it was so cold that it left you scarredfor life. The few cells that grew that year were damaged when the water insidefroze up, expanded and burst the cell walls. Tree rings were examined under amicroscope. The jagged black line clearly showed cell death in the year 1627B.C. What could have caused temperatures in that year to fall so dramatically?Could tree rings be a record of some cataclysmic event in another part of theworld?
METHUSELAH:
Unlike words, tree rings never lie.
One year was freezing cold and dark
The sun was hidden in the sky
I tasted brimstone and it left its mark
Like a noose tightening, like a charred wreath.
What is this thing, I thought, called death?
NARRATOR: That acid taste of death came from a distant islandin the Aegean Sea. The eruption of the volcano on Santorini was probably thebiggest bang in history. Its devastating effects are thought to have wiped outthe Minoan civilization of Crete. The exact date has always been indispute. Could a tree 7,000 miles away provide the answer?
Scientists now think that the volcano shot a plume of ash into thestratosphere which spread as far as China and North America. The thick veil ofdust blocked the sun causing temperatures to plummet.
METHUSELAH:
You can read me like a book
Open me up and take a look:
History laid bare, a garland here
a crown there. Plain as a pikestaff
for all to see. Each year jotted down by me.
The state of the nation, an annual report
in ever decreasing circles. The wheels
of fortune, the cycles of despair.
NARRATOR: The Santorini frost ring made people realizethat tree rings could date events in antiquity with incredible precision. Butsince the early 1960s, a group of tree scientists have been frustrated by thelimitations imposed on the art by the age of the oldest living tree. Theywanted a dating instrument that would go back much further.
This man, Tom Harlan, spends his time combing groves for pieces of deadbristlecone that may be even older than you.
TOM HARLAN (University of Arizona): By taking cores and sectionsout of logs and dead trees, we can overlap our record and go further back intime. So here we have living trees just very close to 5,000 years old. But, byutilizing the logs and snags and what we call remnants, just the fragments ofwood that are lying on the ground, we go back to the year 6,700 B.C. or 8,700years ago as a continuous record.
NARRATOR: His technique is to slide together sequences ofrings from wood of different ages until they line up. By 1969 the world hadit's first unbroken dating record, going back nearly 9,000 years. It was aperfect reference, which could be used to check other dating systems. Itarrived at a time when the complicated chemistry of carbon-dating wasfound to be flawed. Carbon-dating depended for it's accuracy on there being aconstant level of radioactive carbon in the atmosphere. However in the 1960sthis was found not to be the case. Bristlecones came to the rescue. Scientiststook wood of a known date and then subjected it to radio carbon dating to seehow far out it was. They discovered it could be out by as much as a thousandyears. Archaeology was turned on its head. Dates always assumed to be rightwere wrong. The leading theory of how European history evolved had to berevised. You see we'd all believed that the influence of the EasternMediterranean had radiated outwards to the barbaric north. We'd thoughtStonehenge was inspired by the sophisticated Mycenaeans of Greece. In fact itturned out that Stonehenge was built long before.
That's why you and your kin are known as the trees that rewrotehistory.
While Europe was sliding into its dark age, you were entering middle age.When you were three and a half thousand years old you may recall a great changein the White Mountains. The nomadic Paiute Indian hunters began putting downroots of their own.
MICHAEL DELACORTE: About 1300 years ago, so 500, 600 years after thebirth of Christ, we start to see a very different pattern where entire familiesor households would move up here to the highlands for many weeks or even a...acouple of months in the summer. And they spent a long time up here exploitingthe environment much more intensively than they had during that earlier huntingpattern. And that suggests to us that things in the lowlands, where livingconditions are generally a little easier in one sense—it's certainlywarmer—must have been pushed...pushed to the point where all of a sudden theseuplands became more worthwhile to exploit more intensively.
NARRATOR: The rising population forced families to move up to12,000 feet where they established the highest settlements inAmerica.
MICHAEL DELACORTE: In most instances we would have probably seen one,two, three families inhabiting one of these villages in any particular summer.Women probably would have spent a lot of their time collecting roots likebitter root, Louisia, then also the seeds of a lot of these grasses. It's hardto imagine—when you look at them the seeds are so tiny—but those twowere collected and eaten, while men probably would have spent most of theirtime hunting in more distant areas for mountain sheep. Yet none of us workingin this area, doing archaeology in this area had any suspicion until, oh, about12, 13 years ago that people lived in this...in these harsh uplands, in thesekind of settled permanent villages. We always suspected that a littlebit of hunting would have been, would have been going on up here in the summermonths, but we had no notion that this kind of intensive village occupation wasoccurring. Methuselah might have been a little bit worried at times as hewatched people starting to use some of these ancient trees and ancient timberto build these houses, to stoke their fires, to build hunting fences and thatsort of thing, so maybe even a little bit of anxiety.
NARRATOR: Anxiety was soon to turn to terror, not only foryou, Methuselah, but also for the Indians. The white man was coming.
The white immigrant took his time getting to California. By the 1860s, thecanyons around you were echoing to the sounds of rocks being crushed andsifted. Prospectors were searching for silver and gold. Some continue to thisday. Alan Akin has been working these hills for 40 years. He barely makesenough to pay his way.
ALAN AKIN (Gold and silver prospector): There's knowledge andskill involved in prospecting but there's always that element of chance sinceyou can't really see underground. There's a...it could nevertheless fail and nomatter how poor something is there is at least some possibility that it couldturn out to be something great. So, honestly, I'm sure I've spent a lot morethan I've ever made but I still have hope. There...there's always the odds thatin enough time your...it's bound to pay off for you, you know? Whether it'llpay you back for all the time you spent at it is very doubtful but, well youspend enough time at it, sooner or later you're bound to find somethinggood.
NARRATOR: If one prospector hit pay dirt, thousands of othersfollowed. Each time a seam of silver or gold was struck, they swarmed all overthe mountain staking their claim, greed being the human curse. The richestsilver mine was called Cerro Gordo. In 1870, it supported a town of nearly5,000 people, a wild and lawless place.
Ex-Hollywood actress Jody Stewart still lives in this ghosttown.
JODY STEWART: This was an extremely violent town. There was a murder aweek in Cerro Gordo. There are 600 people buried up on the hillside, thehanging tree is laying down Canyon. We have one building, the Belshore House,that has 156 bullet holes in the living room floor.
NARRATOR: And Jody knows how they got there.
JODY STEWART: Dance, ha ha.
MIKE PATTERSON: At night you would hear a little dance hall music andsome gunfire, and you would hear rock hammers and drills striking into the hardrock, and probably an occasional black powder explosion as somebody shot around. The atmosphere here was fairly Dante-esque. At first it was I think asmall mining camp. With...with investment came the large smelters. I've readaccounts where they called Cerro Gordo—which means Fat Hill—they called itOld Smoky. The smelters were belching smoke 24 hours a day. There were at leasttwo large ones that were burning several cords a day; I guess, probably...maybe10, 12 cords a day.
METHUSELAH:
If I had lungs I would be coughing
A throat, I would be parched
If I had eyes they would be stinging
Flesh, it would be scorched.
Sulfur, smoke and cinders
enfold me like a shroud
There is no silver lining
only poison in this cloud.
NARRATOR: The smoke was a by-product of the extraction ofmolten silver from the ore. At its height, the mine yielded 2,000 tons ofsilver a year.
MIKE PATTERSON: Freighting silver bars was always a problem. And at onetime the production from the hill was so great that between 18 and 30,000 ofthese 83 pound bars stacked up waiting shipment by wagon. And the workers werestacking the bars like bricks and stretching canvas over the top and living inthem, so they were really living in silver houses.
NARRATOR: But success for the human spelled disaster for theBristlecone.
Wood was needed to fuel the smelters, to shore up mine shafts and to buildhouses. For miles around you the hills were stripped bare, the air filled withthe silent chemical screams of dying trees. Your defenses weretriggered. When bristlecone skin is broken the needles release evil-smellingchemicals called turpinoids. These are highly effective against insect attack,but are useless against axes and saws.
You were not the only victims. The Paiute Indians suffered a similar fate.Ranchers moved cattle into the valleys to feed the miners. The cattle ate thegrass seeds that formed part of the Indians' staple diet. And the miners huntedthe long horn sheep almost to extinction. The Indian way of life could nolonger be sustained.
The Paiute Indians, who had lived alongside you for over a thousand years,were swept from the valleys within half a decade. Yet these mining towns werenever more than a flash in the pan. The town of Rhyolite boomed for sevenyears, boasting banks, swimming pools and even an opera house. Then when thesilver ran out, the town went bust and the desert reclaimed thestreets.
The metal that drove men mad is bad for you too. When your roots reach outin search of water and nutrients, they absorb dissolved silver. But you'velearned how to deal with this poison by filtering out the silver molecules anddepositing them inside your cells. When your cells get older and die, resinsurrounds them, sealing the toxic contents forever within your trunk. Theproblem for you, Methuselah, isn't silver, but water.
You live in one of the driest places on earth. You can only quench yourthirst during the six weeks of the year when the winter snow melts around yourroots. You've adapted well to your limited supply. Why waste energy onfrivolous growth when one set of needles can last 40 years? The design of yourneedles minimizes water loss. Specially recessed pores ensure that noprecious moisture is lost. The pores remain shut most of the time, unlike thoseof other trees which use and lose gallons a day.
In the desert every drop of water counts, except it seems, in LasVegas.
METHUSELAH:
Water, water everywhere and not a drop...
To think that down there, battery trees
Like plumped up turkeys stand proud and vain.
Bloated and unaware that they are but a switch's
throw away from death.
Water, water not forever...
For twenty-four hours a day, fountains play,
Spraying graffiti that mocks a desert kept at bay.
NARRATOR: How profligate we must seem to you, when a golfcourse consumes a million gallons a day, whereas you can get by on a hundredgallons a year.
In Las Vegas, humans regard the conspicuous display of water as a sign ofluxury. One hotel has 200-foot high fountains. There's even a fake Lake Como.Las Vegans use a staggering 300 gallons per person per day.
Las Vegas is booming. It's the fastest growing city in America. Each year,60,000 people move here and 15,000 new houses are built. Street maps are out ofdate even before they're printed. What you see before you is a display of humanpower over nature.
METHUSELAH:
But nature has a way of saying "Enough."
After the pride there comes the fall
After the boom, the bust.
Remember man that thou art dust,
And unto dust...
NARRATOR: Sixty miles from Las Vegas was a town speciallydesigned to boom and bust. They called it "Doom town."
So, Methuselah, you survived the Bronze age, the Iron age, even the Machineage, but how did you fair in the Nuclear age?
We were on the brink of the Apocalypse, the culmination of half a centuryof human tinkering with the nature of matter. 1957 was a strange year. WhilstEdmund Schulman and his colleagues were collecting data from the bristleconesaround you, 100 miles away, the atom bomb was being tested in the desertbelow.
DOUG POWELL (Edmund Schulman's Assistant, 1957): These bomb testswould come off early in the morning and a number of people would walk up to aheight where we could see the flash of the bomb. And when I look back on itnow, it was remarkable. We...we were just sort of almost oblivious to the...toanything like radioactive fall out. It was a big event and there was a shock. Imean, we would see the glow and the earth would shake, and I mean, we...it waslike a definite boom. It was something almost of a lark event to justsee this, I mean just this manifestation of what the human being could do. Itwas a scientific achievement.
NARRATOR: One hundred thirty miles east of this "achievement"was a Mormon town called St. George. It lay directly downwind of the bomb.Agatha Mannering was in her garden and was given no warning of what was tocome. She became a human guinea-pig.
AGATHA MANNERING: When that went off, I was lifted off of the ground. Itjust came and hit me up through my feet. Then I could see this gray cloudrolling in, just rolling in. And I just stood there and watched it. If I'd'vehad any sense I would've run and hid in the closet or something, but this cloudjust rolled in there and I stood there and I smelled it. It had ahorrible, nasty smell. I began to feel bad and my throat began to burn, mysinuses began to burn and my head became prickly like ants was stinging the topof my head. But now I always would bathe, but this night I felt too bad to.That was the first time I can remember feeling so bad I didn't want to evenbother bathing, and that's the one time in my life I needed to.
And I've had a pile of cancers over my face and body. Now I'm a genealogistand I know what my forefathers died from way back, and none of them ever hadcancer. But all of this generation has had cancer. You know the...so many ofthe people died. There was one or two blocks in St. George that there wasn't ahouse on that block but what someone died of cancer.
NARRATOR: You were lucky to be upwind of the test site. That'show you escaped so lightly with only a trace of Strontium 90 in yourrings.
But for scientists like Edmund Schulman, the 1950s remained a golden age ofinnocence and aspiration. He spent three glorious summers in bristleconecountry coring a thousand trees. His aim was to construct a complete weatherrecord of Western America. He was your greatest fan and never ceased to marvelat your triumph over adversity. Struggling with a failing heart in the thin airof the mountains, he came to wonder almost fancifully, if trees like you heldthe secret of living forever.
DOUG POWELL: He was facing his own mortality, and obviously haddifficulty with breathing and all, and this is why I was working with him. Andso one surprising bit of conversation which came up several times in theseveral weeks that I was with him, is that he would say that somehow he wouldhope that—he used the term elixir—that some substance could be distilled fromthese old trees that the human being could somehow absorb and then would be afactor in longevity in the human beings, that the tree could impart it'sadaptation to adversity to the human being. It seemed to me out of place withthe rest of his work. Here he was, the very careful scientific method of thisextreme care in counting rings, analyzing everything that he said here and thenbranching off into this other, that struck me as a...that definitely...that hehad left the science behind.
NARRATOR: Ironically, in attributing bristlecones with suchsupernatural qualities, Schulman may have been closer to the truth than herealized.
LEROY JOHNSON (US Forest Service, retired): In 1972, we came upand visited the Schulman grove here. And we walked down and saw Methuselah andnoticed that it had a single cone on it. So it suddenly struck us that it wouldbe interesting to find out if a tree that ancient, a tree that was almost 5,000years old, would be able to produce viable seedlings and viable seeds. So wemade arrangements to collect the single cone and we extracted the seed. Therewere 96 seeds and we planted the seeds in our nursery. We got 100 percentgermination, which for us was absolutely astounding. And they were all healthyseedlings, also.
NARRATOR: The genetic material contained within your seeds isperfectly preserved. Our cells are programmed to die.
LEROY JOHNSON: There's no indication that there's a built-in senility tothe tree. Methuselah could live forever. There...there's no indication that itcan't. It's very robust sexually and it seems to be growing healthily, althoughvery slowly, and each year it puts on incremental growth, both height anddiameter, but it's...it's a perfectly healthy, vigorous tree. So, at leasttheoretically, Methuselah could live forever.
NARRATOR: What's your secret? Is it your Spartan existence, aslow metabolism guaranteeing your place in Never Never Land? Perhaps oneday by studying your most personal chemistry, scientists may unravel the elixirof life.
In 1958, the man who became so intrigued by your longevity succumbed tohuman frailty.
MAN: And now, dearly beloved, let us sing Amazing Grace.
NARRATOR: Schulman died at the age of 49. A memorial servicewas held in the shadow of your branches. Since then, other scientists workingwith bristlecones have died prematurely. Is this a curse, Methuselah? Revengefor Schulman's final gift to the world?
He wrote an article for the National Geographic magazine, celebrating thebristlecone, so that others could share the wonder of these trees. But hisgesture backfired. Tourists swarmed up the mountains to try and find you. Theymarveled at the idea of the oldest of living things. In fact they likedyou so much, they tore bits off for souvenirs. Others were driven by moreserious intent.
DON CURREY (University of Utah): When I was starting graduateschool, my mother sent me an issue of The National Geographic that had a majorarticle in it by Edmund Schulman and this was fascinating. I'd never heard ofbristlecone pine. And so I was on the look out for them.And I began tosee them as I was doing some graduate research in the Rocky Mountains and thenout into the Great Basin. Bristlecone pines are out there. And it was a kind ofa sense of discovery, "Wow here's another mountain range with bristleconepines. I wonder how old they are? I wonder what they can tell us?"
NARRATOR: Don Currey was a geography student, and the articlemade him realize that bristlecones might help him date glacial deposits inNevada. On the crest of a glacial moraine, a particularly old and grizzledspecimen caught his eye. By pure chance he'd chosen a tree that would turn outto be even older than you. But he was faced with a problem.
DON CURREY: The normal approach to coring the tree wasn't workingbecause the largest available increment bores were too small to core even fromseveral angles.
NARRATOR: Not having the experience to know what to do next,Currey took a more direct course of action.
DON CURREY: So we cut the tree down and captured from the tree a thickcross section about a foot thick.
NARRATOR: He took the slab back to his motel room and started to countthe rings.
DON CURREY: We could begin to see that we were getting over 4,000 years,over 4,500, over 4,600, which was the oldest record that had been reported inthe literature up until that time. And we ended around 4900 years. And you'vegot to think, "I've got to have done something wrong. I better recount. Ibetter recount again. I better look really carefully with highermagnification."
NARRATOR: It was only then that the full horror of what he haddone began to dawn on him. He had discovered the world's oldest living thingand killed it. Fate had dealt a cruel blow.
DON CURREY: The tree that ended up being cut was literally the first oldtree that we climbed to on the crest of the lateral moraine. Five minutes oflooking is all that was involved.
NARRATOR: Fate had one last hand to deal the victim ofCurrey's chain saw. The slab was laid to rest in the casino of the small townit once looked down on.
METHUSELAH:
Men drop to the earth like leaves
Lives as brief as footprints in snow.
Bristlecones enthroned on top of the world
Watch civilizations come and go.
They seek our secret, immortality,
But search in vain, for it is vanity.
If truth be known I would rather
be a flower, or a leaf that lives
and breathes with brief intensity.
My life is as thin as the wind
And I am done with counting stars.
On the side of this mountain
I might live forever.
Could you imagine anything worse?
My name is Methuselah and this is my curse.
TOM HARLAN: When Schulman died he left quite a few samples that he neverhad a chance to examine, and a number of years after his death, I went throughdating many of these samples and I discovered that out on these slopesthere is a tree older than Methuselah. And in order to protect this tree, I amnot telling anyone which tree it is. Anonymity is its absolute bestdefense.
On NOVA's Web site, travel to the secret location of the Methuselah treegrove, and explore these ancient trees with stunning 360-degree photography, onPBS.org or America Online, Keyword PBS.
To order this show, or any other NOVA program for $19.95 plus shipping andhandling, call WGBH Boston Video at 1-800-255-9424.
NOVA is a production of WGBH Boston.
Major funding for NOVA is provided by the Park Foundation, dedicated toeducation and quality television.
This program is funded in part by the Northwestern Mutual Foundation. Somepeople already know Northwestern Mutual can help plan for your children'seducation. Are you there yet? Northwestern Mutual Financial Network.
Science: it's given us the framework to help make wireless communicationsclear. Sprint PCS is proud to support NOVA.
And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions to yourPBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.
This is PBS.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Methuselah Tree
Original Poetry and Narrator
Roger McGough
Voice of Methuselah
William Hootkins
Additional Narration
Joe Morton
Produced by
Ian Duncan
Nicole Davis
Directed by
Ian Duncan
Edited by
Paul Shepard
Stephanie Munroe
Camera
Mike Coles
Richard Comrie
Music
Daniel Pemberton
Ray Loring
Sound Recordist
George Hitchins
Visual Effects
Chris Reynolds
Graphics
Christopher Vass
Production Manager
Jane Lloyd
Assistant Editor
Dan Van Roekel
Online Editor
Fernando Guerreiro
Colorists
Aidan Farrell
Mark Kueper
Audio Mix
John Jenkins
Research
Robert Hartel
Associate Producer
Jennifer Lorenz
Production Assistant
Jennifer Callahan
Archival Material
Antiquity Publications
Keith A. Trexler
County of Inyo, Eastern California Museum
National Geographic Magazine
Laboratory of Tree Ring Research, University of Arizona
Department of Energy, Nevada
Special Thanks
Laboratory of Tree Ring Research, University of Arizona
USDA Forest Service, California
Dr. Martin Bridges, University College London
Ervin Lent
Bishop Piaute Tribe
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Robert Bettinger
Monsignor Ronald E. Royer
Dr. W. Tom Adams, Oregon State University
Dr. Ed Jensen, Oregon State University
Production Administration for Windfall Films
Susan Harvard
Fiona Reid
NOVA Series Graphics
National Ministry of Design
NOVA Theme
Mason Daring
Martin Brody
Michael Whalen
Post Production Online Editor
Mark Steele
Closed Captioning
The Caption Center
Production Secretaries
Queene Coyne
Linda Callahan
Publicity
Jonathan Renes
Diane Buxton
Katie Kemple
Senior Researcher
Ethan Herberman
Unit Managers
Sarah Goldman
Jessica Maher
Sharon Winsett
Paralegal
Nancy Marshall
Legal Counsel
Susan Rosen Shishko
Business Manager
Laurie Cahalane
Post Production Assistant
Patrick Carey
Associate Producer, Post Production
Nathan Gunner
Post Production Supervisor
Regina O'Toole
Post Production Editors
David Eells
Rebecca Nieto
Supervising Producer
Lisa D'Angelo
Senior Science Editor
Evan Hadingham
Senior Series Producer
Melanie Wallace
Managing Director
Alan Ritsko
Executive Producer
Paula S. Apsell
A Windfall Films Production for NOVA/WGBH and Channel 4
© 2001 WGBH Educational Foundation
All rights reserved 
