I recently produced a YouTube video which referenced a visit to Great Basin National Park, where my son and I hiked up to the bristlecone pine grove below Wheeler Peak — a place I had wanted to see for years. Standing among trees whose rings number well past 3,400, touching wood still alive after thirty-four centuries, has a way of clarifying the mind. It is one thing to read about dendrochronology and quite another to stand next to a living tree that was already ancient when the Roman Empire was young. And it is precisely that kind of concrete, physical reality that makes dendrochronology such a persistent challenge for young-earth creationism.
What prompted me to make the video was something I had not entirely expected: multiple young-earth creationist writers have recently published articles on dendrochronology, and some of them — most notably from the New Creation blog — are saying things that, frankly, would never have appeared on the Answers in Genesis website. Some creationists, it turns out, are starting to talk sense about tree rings. That is worth examining carefully, because it reveals both encouraging intellectual honesty and the very real limits of where that honesty is allowed to go.
A Sudden Flurry of Tree-Ring Articles
Within the span of a few months, dendrochronology has appeared in at least four separate pieces from across the young-earth creationist world — a blog series at New Creation, a lengthy YouTube treatment from Stephen Hackett at Biblical Studies and Reviews, and a peer-reviewed article in Answers Research Journal. This is not, as far as I can tell, a coordinated campaign. It appears to be independent writers all arriving at the same uncomfortable crossroads at roughly the same time: the dendrochronological chronologies, particularly from bristlecone pines and from preserved oak trees in English bogs, simply extend beyond the timeline that young-earth creationism requires. The bristlecone pine chronology reaches back approximately 8,000 years; the English oak bog chronology pushes past 6,400 years before the present. Neither fits within a framework that places Noah’s Flood roughly 4,350 years ago.
The traditional response has always been to suggest that the ring counts are wrong — that some years produce two rings rather than one, inflating the apparent age. This explanation is easy to offer and almost impossible to test without actually studying bristlecone pines carefully. What is notable about these recent articles is that several of their authors have studied the evidence carefully, and they are no longer confident that this traditional response holds up. The New Creation blog states plainly that multiple rings per year do occur but are well understood, corrected for through cross-comparison of many cores, and that for bristlecone pines specifically, no one has successfully demonstrated that a single tree produces two rings in a calendar year. Even the Answers Research Journal paper, to which we will return in a moment, concedes that the pattern-matching statistics underlying the bristlecone pine chronology are robust. This is not nothing. It represents a meaningful departure from the reflexive dismissal that has characterized most young-earth engagement with this evidence.
The New Creation Blog and the Septuagint Gambit
The New Creation blog, which I have written about before, occupies a genuinely different space within young-earth creationism from organizations like Answers in Genesis or the Institute for Creation Research. Its authors are more willing to sit with difficult questions, to acknowledge when the evidence is inconvenient, and to entertain interpretive possibilities that more doctrinaire voices would never allow. The dendrochronology articles there are a good example of this. Having concluded that the methodology is largely sound and that the chronologies genuinely exceed 4,350 years, the author raises two possible escapes: first, that certain ancient climate phenomena related to the Flood may have influenced tree growth in ways not yet fully understood; and second — and this is the one that caught my attention — that our reading of the biblical genealogies may need to be refined.
Specifically, the author raises the possibility of using the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, whose genealogies yield a somewhat longer pre-Flood chronology than the Masoretic text traditionally used by most young-earth chronologists. Under a Septuagint-based reading, the Flood recedes to something like 5,800 years ago rather than 4,350. That is not millions of years, obviously, and it does not solve the problem of an 8,000-year bristlecone pine chronology. But it does allow every currently living tree on Earth to be placed within a post-Flood world, which is the most immediately pressing problem for young-earth creationists who want to explain why Methuselah — a bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of California with roughly 4,500 rings — is still standing. Stephen Hackett, whose YouTube channel I discussed in my video, arrived at a similar conclusion independently, devoting the majority of a 45-minute presentation to a defense of the Septuagint chronology as a way of buying more time. It is worth noting that a generation ago, many young-earth creationists allowed for a world as old as 10,000 years, and the hardening of the 6,000-year figure around Answers in Genesis’s preferred genealogical reading is itself a relatively recent development. The fact that tree rings are now pushing some writers back toward a longer timeline is, at minimum, an interesting development.
Virtual Trees and a Simulation That Does Not Simulate
Then there is the Answers Research Journal paper, which represents a different approach entirely — and which I found considerably less encouraging. Published in May as, remarkably, the only article ARJ has released in the first five months of 2025 after several months of complete publication silence, the paper is titled “A Simulation of the 8000-Year Bristlecone Pine Dendrochronology Using Post-Flood Virtual Trees.” The premise is this: the author created a set of computer-simulated trees, all constrained to be less than 4,500 years old, then attempted to show that by introducing what he calls “disturbance patterns” — not climate patterns — into the ring sequences, one could produce false matches between trees that lived at different times, thereby artificially inflating the apparent chronological length.
The basic visual analogy offered in the paper is something like this: imagine two trees of the same age, both 200 years old, but a boulder rolls against the first tree at year 100 of its life, compressing its growth rings for the next decade. Ninety years later, a different boulder rolls against the second tree, producing the same effect. Now imagine a future researcher, examining cores from both dead trees, who notices a similar pattern of compressed rings in each and — wrongly assuming these patterns reflect the same climatic event — overlaps them incorrectly. The chronology gets stretched: the two trees together appear to have lived through 400 years when they actually shared only 300 years of contemporaneous existence. The author’s claim is that disturbances of this kind, rather than shared climate responses, might account for the apparent depth of the bristlecone pine chronology.
The problem with this argument is that dendrochronology does not work by comparing two trees. The bristlecone pine chronology rests on cores taken from dozens and dozens of individual trees, cross-validated repeatedly over many decades of research, and the ring-width patterns used for matching are not simple blocks of compression but highly specific multi-year sequences — a cluster of narrow drought rings followed by a wide moisture ring followed by three narrow rings, and so on — that are extraordinarily unlikely to be reproduced by independent physical disturbances across multiple trees at multiple sites. The paper’s own abstract acknowledges that the statistical pattern-matching is robust, which creates a rather obvious tension: if the matches are robust, why are disturbance patterns sufficient to explain them away? The simulation essentially asks us to believe that the dendrochronologists have been systematically fooled by coincidental boulder activity across dozens of trees in multiple mountain ranges, which is not a serious scientific proposal. I will be candid: I am not certain the paper should have been published in its current form, and I am not entirely sure what the editorial process looked like on the way in.
Less Time Than They Think
There is one more layer to this problem that did not get as much attention in my video as it deserved, and that I want to flag briefly here. Young-earth creationist writers typically frame the dendrochronology problem as a question of fitting 4,500 years of tree rings into a 4,350-year window since the Flood. But that framing is already too generous. Almost all young-earth creationists accept the reality of a post-Flood ice age, lasting hundreds of years and not fully retreating until roughly 3,800 to 4,000 years ago. When I hiked up to the bristlecone pine grove below Wheeler Peak, I was walking through what was clearly once glaciated terrain — a moraine that at one time lay beneath an ice sheet. The last glacier in Nevada, now projected to disappear within the next five years, is retreating from this same mountain. In a young-earth chronology, that glacier existed after the Flood. Which means the very location where a 4,000-year-old dead bristlecone pine now lies was underneath ice within the past 4,000 years. After the ice melts, the bare rock must erode sufficiently to support soil. Seeds must arrive. The seedling must germinate, establish itself, and grow through its earliest years before producing the rings that researchers can actually date. The practical window for bristlecone pine establishment in these high-elevation environments, under a young-earth ice age model, is considerably less than 4,000 years. The problem is more severe than it first appears.
What This Moment Tells Us
I want to be careful here not to overstate what is happening. The New Creation blog raising the Septuagint chronology is not a concession that the earth is old. Stephen Hackett adopting the Septuagint timeline does not solve the 8,000-year bristlecone pine chronology, let alone the 15,000-year European bog-oak chronology, or the other dendrochronological series that extend even further. And the Answers Research Journal simulation paper does not actually demonstrate that the bristlecone pine chronology is illusory — its own abstract says as much. What is happening is that thoughtful young-earth writers are encountering genuinely difficult evidence, responding to it with more intellectual honesty than is typical, and discovering that the traditional dismissals do not hold. That is not nothing. It does not solve the problem, but it is a more honest starting point than pretending the problem does not exist.
If you would like to explore these questions in greater depth, including photographs from the Wheeler Peak bristlecone grove and a closer look at the ARJ article, I invite you to watch the full video on my YouTube channel. A more extensive treatment of the science of dendrochronology is also forthcoming as part of my Great Basin Chronicles series.
Blessings, Joel
Naturalis Historia 
Comments or Questions?