This isn’t an isolated event. Of the 13 oldest known baobabs in the world, four have completely died in the last dozen years, and another five are on the way, having lost their oldest stems. “These large and monumental trees, which can live for 2,000 years or more, were dying one after another,” says Adrian Patrut from Babes-Bolyai University in Romania, who has catalogued the deaths. “It’s sad that in our short lives, we are able to live through such an experience.”

Baobabs often have hollow trunks, with huge internal cavities that humans have used as shops, houses, chapels, and even prisons. When trees are hollow, it’s usually because the wood inside them has died. But baobab hollows were never filled; instead, these trees periodically produce new stems in the way that other trees sprout new branches. It’s the stems, fused together in a ring, that form the hollow space. That’s why the cavity is lined with bark, and shrinks with age.

Patrut discovered this unique architecture by visiting almost all the biggest and oldest baobabs in the world, and carbon-dating their various stems. He and his team would bore tiny holes into the wood and extract millimeter-wide chips, which they sent to the U.S. to be analyzed. And through this work, they also learned exactly how old these mythical trees can get.

European explorers claimed that baobabs could live for up to 5,000 years, but their true lifespan has been hard to calculate. They don’t necessarily lay down new growth rings every year, and even when they do, those rings are often too faint to count. Carbon-dating is the only way to accurately work out their age.

The oldest tree that Patrut’s team studied—the Panke baobab from Zimbabwe—was more than 2,500 years old when it died in 2011. Two other trees—Dorslandboom in Namibia and Glencoe in South Africa—are also more than 2,000 years old; their largest and oldest stems have collapsed, but parts of them are still alive. The same can’t be said for the Platland tree, which was arguably the biggest and most visited baobab. In 2016 and 2017, all five of its stems split apart and fell.

No one can say if baobabs have died off in this way in centuries past; these trees decay very quickly, and leave few traces behind. “But when around 70 percent of your 1,500 to 2,000-year-old trees died within 12 years, it certainly is not normal,” says Erika Wise from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “It is difficult to come up with a culprit other than climate change.”

Patrut agrees. Although he originally suspected that Homasi was killed by a disease, none of the fallen trees have shown signs of infection, and the pattern of their deaths doesn’t fit with a spreading contagion. Many of them were found in national parks, which absolves agricultural practices and other local human activities. Instead, Patrut blames “an unprecedented combination of temperature increase and drought in southern Africa, over the past 10 to 15 years.”