The Oldest Thing

Jeanne Calment told a story about meeting Vincent van Gogh when she was 13. This was 1888.

Van Gogh came into her uncle’s fabric shop to buy some canvas for paintings. Recalling the meeting a century later, Calment did not mince words, describing the legendary painter as “very disagreeable”, adding that he "reeked of alcohol."

This brush between two notable historical figures may be a malleable memory, but let’s pause for a moment anyway. Let’s travel briefly back in time to this encounter.

1888 saw the rise of the bicycle, long before automobiles were much more than a concept. Electricity was decades away for most people, and the streets of Arles (where Calment lived her entire life) were lit by gaslight and populated by horse-drawn carriages.

Van Gogh was dead two years later by suicide, famously bringing a painful life to a painful end (he shot himself in the stomach!). Calment, on the other hand, lived before there was electricity, and after there was internet.

She got to see photographs become more and more common. She saw the invention and widespread adoption of radio, motion pictures, television, human powered flight, rockets going into space, computers, vacuum cleaners, and microwave ovens.

With one foot in the distant Victorian era and one foot nearly in the 21st century, Jeanne Calment lived to be the ripe old age of 122, the oldest known human ever to live.

Calment at age 20

It’s tough to imagine living through so much change. Still, even the very longest human lifespan is comparatively very short.

Today, let’s briefly ask the question: what’s the oldest thing there is?

This might seem like a pretty simple question, but you really have to look at different categories of “things” in order to give an accurate answer.

The Methuselah Tree in California is nearly 5000 years old, and it’s still alive! While humans were figuring out how the wheel worked, this tree was just beginning to grow up. Even still, it’s nowhere near the oldest thing alive on the planet today. Seagrass beds date back as much as 200,000 years, all the way back to the very beginnings of anatomically modern humans.

photo: Yen Chao

What about non-living things? Humans were making tools more than 3 million years ago, although these were tiny proto-homo sapiens. Prehistory is littered with the things we’ve made. But objects made by humans don’t even hold a candle to the oldest things there are.

Here on earth, there are zircon crystals discovered in Australia, which are about 4.4 billion years old. That’s more than a thousand times as old as those 3 million year old hand axes. During this time, the earth was a molten mass with frequent volcanic activity—a young planet undergoing significant geological and atmospheric changes.

Of course, the earth itself is older than the crystals that formed on earth, which comes in at 4.53 billion years old, give or take. The earth formed in the same swirling mass as our sun, but of course they came from an even older star that eventually went supernova. That’s where all the heavy elements came from.

That older star, and others like it, populated the early universe. One that’s close to home goes back 14 billion years, and it’s another Methuselah (the “Methuselah Star”).

Back to Jeanne Calment.

This lady witnessed more than a century of human progress, from the glow of gaslight to the glow of computer monitors. Yet, this ultra-long human lifespan was a forty times shorter than the oldest tree, and even that pales in comparison when compared to the oldest non-living things, many thousands of times older.

Journeys backward through time like this are important. We need to understand where we’ve come from in order to understand where we might be going, and we need to understand that time is much, much bigger than we are. Hopefully, this helps to provide a little context, while also giving you some A-grade trivia.

Let me pose a different kind of question, just to get the creative juices flowing: what’s the oldest thing you own? And, as a follow up: what’s the oldest thing you’ve ever seen? Take the question any direction you want today, and let me know in the comments.