What do you think of this fact?
Imagine finding a jar of jam from Roman times in your basement, and it’s still good. That’s roughly what happened in Israel with a date seed. Except it didn’t become breakfast. It became a tree.
A seed from a fortress
In the 1960s, archaeologists digging at Masada, an ancient fortress above the Dead Sea, pulled date seeds out of the rubble. Radiocarbon dating showed the seeds were about 2000 years old, from roughly the time of the Jewish revolt against Rome in the 1st century. Then they sat in storage for more than 40 years.
Physician Sarah Sallon wanted to know if any life was left in them. Plant expert Elaine Solowey of the Arava Institute at Kibbutz Ketura gave it a shot. In March 2005, the unlikely happened: one of the seeds sprouted.
Methuselah grows up
They named the seedling Methuselah, after the biblical figure famous for living an absurdly long time. After 26 months it was already about 1.2 meters (4 feet) tall. In 2011 it moved from the greenhouse into the ground, and years later it stood more than three meters tall.
Methuselah belongs to the Judean date, a variety that was famous in ancient times and vanished centuries ago. Suddenly a living piece of it was back. The journal Science covered the story in 2008, and the palm even made it into Guinness World Records.
A date with Hannah
One catch: Methuselah is male, so he doesn’t grow dates. His pollen works fine, though. So Solowey tried more ancient seeds. Out of 32 chosen, 6 sprouted, including a female palm named Hannah.
Pollinated by Methuselah and two other ancient palms named Adam and Jonah, Hannah produced almost 700 dates in 2021, up from 111 in her very first harvest. According to the researchers, they’re semi-dry with hints of honey and caramel.
Methuselah still isn’t the record holder for ancient plants: in 2012, Russian scientists grew an Arctic plant from material about 32,000 years old.
So a fruit nobody had tasted since antiquity is back on the table. Sometimes patience really is the best survival strategy.