Home builders aren’t particularly interested in using 40,000-year-old cypress trees, but artists and scientists can’t get enough of the wood.

That’s been the reaction to the marketing of ancient cypress trees found preserved at the bottom of a sand pit near Johnsonville. Ancient Cypress LLC, a company formed to market the wood, has sold several thousand board feet since its discovery was mentioned in The State in September, said Steve Lane, who discovered the buried forest.

“It’s going for artwork more than anything else,” Lane said.

Scientists are even more interested than artists. Dozens have taken up Ancient Cypress on its offer to let them study the tree trunks.

Many of them gathered near Johnsonville in February for a symposium on the wood, which has been carbon dated at from 25,000 to 45,000 years old.

David Stahle, a University of Arkansas authority on the study of tree rings, presented a 40-page paper at the conference.

“This is the kind of find I’ve been hoping for for a long time,” Stahle said.

Hundreds of tree trunks settled in the sandy muck, apparently felled by some sort of natural disaster and washed into a ravine during a time when woolly mammoths roamed the Southeast. Just the right mix of water and sand preserved the trunks but didn’t turn them into petrified wood.

A sand mining operation piled up the trunks and burned them for years, considering them useless waste. Lane, a friend of the sand mining company owner, noticed the trees and asked if he could have them tested. When the carbon dating showed how old the trees were, Lane and several partners decided to market the wood.

Cypress trees this old have been found in smaller concentrations, a few trunks at a site, Stahle said. But never before have this many similar specimens been found together. The high number of trees makes for more compelling scientific evidence.

Stahle recently drilled core samples from 20 logs, enough to keep him busy for years studying the rings and hypothesizing on their meaning. Cypress trees can live more than a thousand years, meaning a millennia of weather patterns can be found in each tree.

“We can tell what the environment was like, what were the important climate factors in the Carolinas in the late Pleistocene era,” Stahle said.

Lane has encouraged the scientific study, hoping it will increase the cachet of the wood. Artists who have seen it appreciate the tight grain and chocolate color.

A podium sculpted from one of the ancient cypress logs was donated to Gov. Mark Sanford’s office recently, and a large log section was given to the State Museum.

Reach Holleman at (803) 771-8366 or jholleman@thestate.com.