More than half their lifetime had passed by the time Christ was born. The Norman invasion of England, the Viking discovery of North America, and the Mongol Empire are recent history to them. Whole forests of several species are alive now that were old when the first permanent European settlements in the new world were founded. Different kinds or species of trees can be told apart in many ways, some of them available to the blind. The feel of the leaves, twigs, and bark varies from species to species.
Some trees have distinctive odors.
Even the sounds the wind makes in the trees can be different depending on the kind of tree. And some birds are heard in one kind of tree, but not in others. Go to Index Evolutionary History Trees, in some form or another, have been around for a lot longer than we have. The first plants to meet the general definition of trees were probably the giant tree ferns which are now rare, but were common enough during the Carboniferous Era to form the coal and oil deposits we now use. Most trees, as we commonly think of them, fall into one of two groups which we can call coniferous and broad-leaved.