Another uncertainty is that it is not clear why the felling of such an old tree was necessary given what Currey was studying. Since the Little Ice Age had started no more than 600 years ago, many trees could presumably have provided the information he was seeking for that time period. In Currey's original report in the journal "Ecology" (Currey, 1965), however, he refers to the Little Ice Age as encompassing the period from 2000 BC to the present, thus defining the Age over a much longer time period than is currently accepted. Whether this was a common view at the time is not known. In the article, Currey indicates that he sectioned the tree as much to determine whether the oldest bristlecones were necessarily confined to California's White Mountains (as some dendrochronologists had been claiming) as from its usefulness in regard to studies of the Little Ice Age.