From the shadow of the garage, I beheld the back yard, with its Norwegian maples, the tilted white birches, the ancient apple tree whose branches touched the windows of the family room, and for the first time, it seemed, I understood the green glory of this acreage as something indifferent to human life and quite apart from the Victorian manse set upon it.

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To substitute for fossils, and thus reconstruct the ancient branches of the tree as well as the modern-day leaves, Dr Dunn used mathematically informed guesswork.

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There's even documentation for an ancient tree situated below the front porch.

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Walking through my favorite part of campus, past an ancient gnarly tree by the faculty club, I came upon three students playing frisbee.

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Fossils from this ancient offshoot of the human family tree, called Australopithecus sediba, were discovered in 2008 at Malapa, near Johannesburg, South Africa.

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In the other direction, a wheelchair-accessible boardwalk heads 300m along the banks of the Pieman River to an ancient Huon pine tree.

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Having planted themselves centuries ago, the tree's serpentine roots pry apart the ancient stones and their immense trunks straddle the once bustling Buddhist temple.

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After a short flight from Kathmandu to the mountain hamlet of Lukla, it took me 12 days to reach Base Camp, trekking 160km and climbing 10, 000 feet, hiking through dense forest, over a dozen suspension bridges, above the tree line and, finally, into a frozen landscape of ancient rock and glacial ice.

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Travellers live in the rustic tree houses, eat by the fire and spend their days exploring the ancient frontiers on the beach.

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