9 random really old things

Oldest person
Supercentenarian, Jeanne Calment of France was the oldest person to have ever lived. She died at age 122 years and 164 days in 1997, five years after she quit smoking.

Oldest animal
A 400-year-old clam from Iceland is the oldest animal ever. When this animal was a juvenile, King James I replaced Queen Elizabeth I as English monarch, Shakespeare was writing his plays and Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for saying the sun rather than the earth was the centre of the universe (we all know he was wrong and that the teen is the centre of the universe - just ask her).

Oldest tree
The world's oldest clonal tree is the Old Tjikko, a spruce tree in Sweden. The tree is 9,550 years old, taking root at the end of the last ice age. (No part of a clonal tree is particularly old at any given point in time - the the plant has been alive for a long time and just keeps sprouting.

Prometheus, the oldest non-clonal organism, a pine tree in eastern Nevada, was cut down in 1964 by a graduate student and U.S. Forest Service personnel who didn’t realise it was important. It was about 5,000 years old. Oops.

Oldest recipe
The oldest surviving recipes were impressed into three clay tablets 3,700 years ago somewhere in what is now Iraq. They were originally mistaken for pharmaceutical formulas.

Oldest toy
Barbie of the Bronze Age, a 4,000-year-old Italian doll, is the world's oldest toy. The doll's head is about four centimetres long, with carved facial features and a curly head of hair. The body was wood or material and rotted away. Clearly, the playing habits of children have barely changed in 4,000 years.

Oldest goldfish
The world's oldest captive goldfish, Tish, died in 1999, 43 years after he was won as a prize at a funfair. Tish was buried in a yoghurt carton in his owner’s garden. Classy casket.

Oldest .com domain name
The first .com domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com , on 15 March 1985 by the now defunct Massachusetts-based computer manufacturer Symbolics. Symbolics.com didn’t change ownership for nearly 25 years but domain name investment company, XF.com Investments, bought the domain name last year for an undisclosed sum.

Oldest mother
Omkari Panwar, 70, underwent IVF treatment to produce a male heir. Her husband mortgaged his land, sold his buffalos, spent his life savings and took out a credit card loan to finance the treatment. She gave birth to twins (a girl and – thank goodness – a boy). The boy was subsequently run over by a news van (only kidding about the death).

Oldest bottle of wine
A bottle of wine from approximately 325AD was unearthed in 1867 during excavation for building a house in Germany. The ancient liquid has a lot of silty sediment but if you left it until late in the night, it would probably go down better than the dodgy old port in the bottom of my pantry.