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What is this thing, I thought, called death?"
McGOUGH: That acid taste of death
came from a distant island in the Aegean Sea.
The eruption of the volcano on Santorini
was probably the biggest *** in history.
Its devastating effects are thought
to have wiped out the Minoan civilization of Crete.
The exact date has always been in dispute.
Could a tree 7,000 miles away provide the answer?
Scientists now think
that the volcano shot a plume of ash into the stratosphere
which spread as far as China and North America.
The thick veil of dust blocked the sun,
causing temperatures to plummet.
HOOTKINS ( as 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."
McGOUGH: The Santorini frost ring made people realize
that tree rings could date events in antiquity
with incredible precision.
But since the early 1960s,
a group of tree scientists have been frustrated
by the limitations imposed on the art
by the age of the oldest living tree.
They wanted a dating instrument that would go back much further.
This man, Tom Harlan, spends his time
combing groves for pieces of dead bristlecone
that may be even older than you.
HARLAN: By taking cores and sections out of logs and dead trees,
we can overlap our record and go further back in time.
So here, we have living trees
just very close to 5,000 years old,
but by utilizing the logs and snags
and what we call remnants--
just the fragments of wood that are lying on the ground--
we go back to the year 6,700 B.C., or 8,700 years ago,
as a continuous record.
McGOUGH: His technique is to slide together
sequences of rings from wood of different ages
until they line up.
By 1969, the world had its first unbroken dating record,
going back nearly 9,000 years.
It was a perfect reference
which could be used to check other dating systems.
It arrived at a time
when the complicated chemistry of carbon dating
was found to be flawed.
Carbon dating depended for its accuracy
on there being a constant level
of radioactive carbon in the atmosphere.
However, in the 1960s,
this was found not to be the case.
Bristlecones came to the rescue.
Scientists took wood of a known date
and then subjected it to radiocarbon dating
to see how far out it was.
They discovered it could be out by as much as a thousand years.
Archaeology was turned on its head.
Dates always assumed to be right were wrong.
The leading theory of how European history evolved
had to be revised.
You see, we'd all believed
that the influence of the eastern Mediterranean
s
We'd thought Stonehenge was inspired
by the sophisticated Mycenaeans of Greece.
In fact, it turned out
that Stonehenge was built long before.
That's why you and your kin are known
as the trees that rewrote history.
While Europe was sliding into its Dark Age,
you were entering middle age.
When you were 3,500 years old,
you may recall a great change
The nomadic Paiute Indian hunters
began putting down roots of their own.
DELACORTE: About 1,300 years ago--
so 500, 600 years after the birth of Christ--
we start to see a very different pattern,
where entire families or households
would move up here to the highlands
for many weeks or even a couple of months in the summer,
and they spent a long time up here,
exploiting the environment much more intensively
than they had during that earlier hunting pattern.
And that suggests to us that things in the lowlands,
where living conditions are generally
a little easier in one sense-- it's certainly warmer--
must have been pushed, pushed to the point
where all of a sudden,
these uplands became more worthwhile
to exploit more intensively.
McGOUGH: The rising population forced families
to move up to 12,000 feet,
where they established the highest settlements in America.
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 tim
collecting roots like bitterroot, lewisia,
and also the seeds of a lot of these grasses.
It's hard to imagine when you look at them--
the seeds are so tiny--
but those, too, were collected and eaten,
while men probably would have spent most of their time
hunting in more distant areas for mountain sheep.
Yet, none of us working in this area,
doing archaeology in this area,
had any suspicion until, oh, about 12, 13 years ago
that people lived in this, in these harsh uplands,
in these kinds of settled permanent villages.
We always suspected that a little bit of hunting
would have been going on up here in the summer months,
but we had no notion that this kind
of intensive village occupation was occurring.
Methuselah might have been a little bit worried at times
as he watched people starting to use
some of these ancient trees and ancient timber
to build these houses, to stoke their fires,
to build hunting fences and that sort of thing,
so maybe even a little bit of anxiety.
McGOUGH: Anxiety was soon to turn to terror,
not only for you, Methuselah, but also for the Indians.
The white man was coming.
The white immigrant took his time getting to California.
( hammer tapping )
McGOUGH: By the 1860s, the canyons around you
were echoing to the sounds of rocks being crushed and sifted.
Prospectors were searching for silver and gold.
Some continue to this day.
Alan Akin has been working these hills for 40 years.
He barely makes enough to pay his way.
AKIN: There's knowledge and skill involved in prospecting,
but there's always that element of chance
since you can't really see underground,
there's a... it could nevertheless fail
poor
there is at least some possibility
that it could turn out to be something great,
so, uh...
Oh, honestly, I'm sure I've spent a lot more
than I've ever made,
but I still have hope...
There's always the odds that...
that in enough time, your...
It's bound to pay off for you, you know.
Whether it'll pay you back for all the time you spent at it
is very doubtful, but...
Well, you spend enough time at it,
sooner or later you'll... bound to find something good.
McGOUGH: If one prospector hit pay dirt, thousands of others followed.
Each time a seam of silver or gold was struck,
they swarmed all over the mountain staking their claim,
greed being the human curse.
The richest silver mine was called Cerro Gordo.
In 1870, it supported a town of nearly 5,000 people--
a wild and lawless place.
Ex-Hollywood actress Jody Stewart
still lives in this ghost town.
STEWART: This was an extremely violent town.
There was a *** a week in Cerro Gordo.
There are 600 people buried up on the hillside.
The hanging tree is laying down canyon.
We have one building, the Belshaw House,
that has 156 bullet holes in the living room floor.
McGOUGH: And Jody knows how they got there.
( laughing ): Dance!
MAN: At night, you would hear
a little dance hall music and some gunfire
and you would hear rock hammers and drills
striking into the hard rock
and probably an occasional black powder explosion
as somebody shot a round.
The atmosphere here was fairly Dantesque.
At first, it was, I think, a small mining camp.
But then, with investment came the large smelters.
I've read accounts where they called Cerro Gordo,
which means Fat Hill, they called it "Old Smoky."
The smelters were belching smoke 24 hours a day.
There were at least two large ones
that were burning several cords a day, I guess.
Probably, maybe ten, 12 cords a day.
HOOTKINS ( as 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.
"
uct
of the extraction of molten silver from the ore.
At its height, the mine yielded 2,000 tons of silver a year.
PATTERSON: Freighting silver bars was always a problem
and at one time, the production from the hill was so great
that between 18,000 and 30,000 of these 83-pound bars
stacked up waiting shipment by wagon,
and the workers were stacking the bars like bricks
and stretching canvas over the top and living in them.
So they were really living in silver houses.
McGOUGH: But success for the human
spelled disaster for the bristlecone.
McGOUGH: Wood was needed to fuel the smelters,
to shore up mine shafts and to build houses.
For miles around you, the hills were stripped bare,
the air filled with the silent chemical screams of dying trees.
Your defenses were triggered.
When bristlecone skin is broken,
the needles release evil-smelling chemicals
called turpenoids.
These are highly effective against insect attack,
but are useless against axes and saws.
ly victims;
the Paiute Indians suffered a similar fate.
Ranchers moved cattle into the valleys to feed the miners.
The cattle ate the grass seeds
that formed part of the Indians' staple diet,
and the miners hunted the longhorn sheep
almost to extinction.
The Indian way of life could no longer be sustained.
( singing in a Native American language )
( singing continues, grows fainter )
McGOUGH: The Paiute Indns,
who had lived alongside you for over a thousand years,
were swept from the valleys within half a decade.
Yet these mining towns were never more
than a flash in the pan.
The town of Rhyolite boomed for seven years,