Scientists have successfully grown a date palm from a 2000-year-old
seed dug up from the Judean desert. That makes the seed, whose age has
just been verified by radiocarbon dating, the oldest ever to germinate.
Once upon a time, the Dead Sea region was famous for its full-size,
succulent dates. The fruits were renowned for their sweetness and for
their use in treating respiratory problems and depression. Indeed,
Judean dates represented Israel's biggest export business 2000 years
ago. But centuries of wars, invasions, and drought disrupted date
cultivation, and by the time of the Crusades 800 years ago, the
region's vast date forests had disappeared.
In 1963, a team of archaeologists, excavating King Herod's fortress in
Masada, near the Dead Sea, discovered ancient date seeds beneath the
rubble. They preserved the seeds in a room for more than 40 years, with
the intent of studying them further, and recently, a team of botanists,
agronomists, and biologists did just that. Led by Sarah Sallon, head of
the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center in Jerusalem, the
researchers decided to plant some of the date seeds as part of a
project to regrow medicinal plants lost from the area.
There have been many claims of "ancient" seeds germinating but usually
without well-accepted verification of the seeds' ages. So Sallon's team
turned to radiocarbon dating, which measures the age of objects based
on the decay rate of their carbon isotopes, to date two of the seeds to
about 2110 and 1995 years old.
The researchers were unable to plant those seeds, because the dating
process destroys the shell, but they did plant a third seed. That seed
germinated after 8 weeks, similar to modern dates. After allowing the
plant--nicknamed Methuselah after the oldest person in the Bible--to
grow for 15 months, the scientists dated shell fragments clinging to
rootlets from the seed and arrived at an age of about 1700 years. The
researchers suspect that the original seed was closer to 2000 years old
but that the carbon the plant incorporated as it grew skewed the
calculations.
Sallon and colleagues, who report their findings tomorrow in science,
are currently conducting genetic analysis on the young plants to see
whether they represent an extinct species. If so, Sallon says her team
will try to reintroduce the plant to Israel. That could allow
scientists to cross the ancient date with more modern varieties, in the
hopes of creating palms more resistant to infection and drought, for
example.
Palm expert William Baker of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in
Richmond, U.K., agrees that the resurrected palm could be useful for
conservation purposes. But he notes that only the female plant produces
seeds, so the ancient seeds will have more value if they develop into
female plants.
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