2,000-year-old seeds were discovered in 1963 inside an ancient jar in Israel. They were planted in 2005 and a tree that had been extinct for over 1800 years sprouted.
Sarah Sallon, a medical doctor who worked at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, went looking for medicinal plants in Jerusalem. And she found lots of them. But she also heard about ancient medicinal plants that had disappeared.
“They’re just historical ghosts,” she says. “Like the famous date plantations along the Dead Sea, 2,000 years ago — described by Pliny; described by Josephus, the first-century historian. They’re not there anymore. They just vanished!”
Sallon realized, though, that seeds from those trees still existed. They’d been recovered from archaeological sites. So she went to the archaeologists and proposed planting some of those seeds, to see if they’d grow again. It didn’t go well at first. “They thought I was mad!” she says. “They didn’t think that this was even conceivable.”
But she kept pushing, and eventually persuaded a few of them to provide some seeds to try this with. More than a decade ago, she and Elaine Solowey, a researcher at the Arava Institute of Environmental Studies, planted some of these ancient palm seeds. “Six weeks later, little green shoots appeared!” she says.
One tree grew ~ A male date palm tree named Methuselah, after Noah’s grandfather, the oldest man in the Bible. This palm sprouted from a 2,000-year-old seed nearly a decade ago and is thriving today, according to the Israeli researcher who is cultivating the historic plant.
The plant was sprouted in a laboratory in 2005, and when a National Geographic news story about the event resurfaced this week on the social media website Reddit, we decided to check in on Methuselah and see how it’s doing. “He is a big boy now,” says Elaine Solowey,
“He is over three meters [ten feet] tall, he’s got a few offshoots, he has flowers, and his pollen is good,” she says. “We pollinated a female with his pollen, a wild [modern] female, and yeah, he can make dates.”
In 2005, Solowey, an expert in desert agriculture, germinated the ancient seed, which was recovered decades earlier from an archaeological excavation at Masada, a historic mountainside fortress. The seed had spent years in a researcher’s drawer in Tel Aviv.
In the years since Methuselah first sprouted, Solowey has successfully germinated a handful of other date palms from ancient seeds recovered at archaeological sites around the Dead Sea. “I’m trying to figure out how to plant an ancient date grove,” she says.
To do that, she’ll need to grow a female plant from an ancient seed as a mate for Methuselah. So far, at least two of the other ancient seeds that have sprouted are female.
If Solowey succeeds, she notes, “we would know what kind of dates they ate in those days and what they were like. That would be very exciting.”
In 2012, scientists in Russia were able to grow a plant from 32,000-year-old seeds that had been buried by an Ice Age squirrel in Siberia. (See “32,000-Year-Old Plant Brought Back to Life—Oldest Yet.”)
Genetic tests indicate that Methuselah is most closely related to an ancient variety of date palm from Egypt known as Hayany, which fits with a legend that says dates came to Israel with the children of the Exodus, Solowey says.
“It is pretty clear that Methuselah is a western date from North Africa rather than from Iraq, Iran, Babylon,” she explains. “You can’t confirm a legend, of course.”
In addition to Solowey’s hopes of establishing an orchard of ancient dates, she and colleagues are interested in studying the plants to see if they have any unique medicinal properties.
The other date palms sprouted from ancient seeds look similar to Methuselah; distinguishing characteristics, Solowey says, include a sharp angle between the fronds and spine.
“A lot of people have kind of forgotten about Methuselah,” Solowey says. “He is actually a really pretty tree.”
When Sallon talks about the possibility of eating dates just like the ones that people in the bible ate, her voice fills with wonder and expectation. According to ancient writers, she says, these dates “were known for their wonderful sweetness, their very large size, and their ability to be stored for a long time, so they actually were exported around the Roman empire.”
Now they may live again, which Sallon takes as a sign of hope for the world. She’s written a children’s book about this, telling the story from the date’s point of view, and hopes to get it published soon.
Historically
In1963, archaeologists began a dig around King Herod the Great’s palace at the ancient fortress of Masada. The ruins sit atop a jutting plateau of rock in Southern Israel, which overlooks the Judaean Desert to one side and the Dead Sea to the other. It’s naturally fortified by steep cliffs rising some 1,300 feet. About 100 miles north lay the Jordan Valley, with its forests of 40-foot date palms, a medicinal fruit tree that symbolized life and prosperity.
In order to feed hundreds of subjects, Herod had dates and other delicacies shipped to the remote mountaintop — peaches, figs, olives, almonds, wine, and birds for meat, according to Roman historian Flavius Josephus. Then in 73 CE, the Romans attacked the fortress. The siege lasted a full year, during which time the Jews subsisted on what jarred food remained. Ultimately, rather than surrender, they set fire to Herod’s citadel and committed mass suicide. Most of the buildings were left to decay — along with a few tiny seeds that waited inside their warm jar.
Two thousand years later, excavators discovered that curious clay jar buried deep in hot, dry dirt. It was undisturbed and intact. Inside they found several date palm seeds. Back at the lab, scientists broke off tiny chips of the seeds’ shells; carbon dating estimated their origin between 155 BC and 64 CE.
Both the Bible and the Koran praise the date palm. The tree provided shade, food, and medicine. In the “land of milk and honey,” dates were the honey. The fruit was large, dark, and very sweet, says Solowey. It had good “shelf life” and was in high demand in Rome.
“Roman emperors wanted Judean dates for their tables,” Solowey told Timeline. “Since they had absolutely nothing else good to say about Jews, Judea, or Judaism, I assume they were very good dates.”
The ancient fruit made tonics for longevity, laxatives, and aphrodisiacs; lore claims they could cure infections. The date was so important to the region that it featured on ancient coinage, and even on Israel’s 10-shekel coin today. But 800 years ago, crusaders destroyed the last Judean palm and rendered the plant extinct. Dr. Sallon hopes Methuselah is the key to medicinal remedies once lost to history.
“Within a 2,000-year-old seed, a germ of life was still alive,” wrote Jane Goodall in her 2013 book Seeds of Hope, “waiting, waiting, waiting for the right conditions to wake, like Rip Van Winkle, into a strange and different world.”
https://timeline.com/methuselah-judean-date-palm-b3782ff1d731
Tree Weaver 