Same thing with .NET. When I see these things I wonder, is it that recruiters really have no clue of what they are asking or are they doing it to "catch" the kind of people who like to bluff/lie on their resume?
And some of the applicants are presumably thinking something like "I'm as familiar with this as I'd need to be to perform the job. And I'm not going to mouth off to HR about how they don't know how long Java has been in existence. So I might as well apply."
E.g. "I've been developing in XX language since it was released", "The technology has been available for X years and I started using it shortly after it was made public".
Well, im not a native English speaker so I'm probably a bit short on vocabulary to express it here. But stuff like that, shows that you know what you're talking about without telling them in their faces that they don't.