Four hundred million years later, we still take for granted one of nature’s greatest creations.
(Author’s note: We will be adding new images to this story periodically.)
About 4 million years ago, when humans stopped hanging from trees and started walking, they abandoned them. Not literally, of course. But by going it alone, humans began hundreds of millions of years of separation. Trees, once our ancestral homes, eventually became resources to be exploited, not fellow lifeforms to be respected. And while it’s true that trees are still valued for their nutrition, shade, beauty, and ability to absorb carbon dioxide and then release oxygen, we rarely stop to consider whether trees have an inner life.
It turns out that this is indeed the case.
Scientific studies have shown that trees communicate, cooperate, and coordinate through a complex network just a few inches below the soil surface. Rather than a collection of lonely trees waiting to sit at someone’s dinner table, the trees are part of a very ancient lineage that dates back 400 million years. In fact, today’s ginkgo trees have been around for an estimated 270 million years, putting the human species just shy of its existence, which is just 6 million years.
