[Paleopsych] NYT: After 2, 000 Years, a Seed From Ancient Judea Sprouts

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After 2,000 Years, a Seed From Ancient Judea Sprouts
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/international/middleeast/12palm.html

    By [3]STEVEN ERLANGER

    JERUSALEM, June 11 - Israeli doctors and scientists have succeeded in
    germinating a date seed nearly 2,000 years old.

    The seed, nicknamed Methuselah, was taken from an excavation at
    Masada, the cliff fortress where, in A.D. 73, 960 Jewish zealots died
    by their own hand, rather than surrender to a Roman assault. The point
    is to find out what was so exceptional about the original date palm of
    Judea, much praised in the Bible and the Koran for its shade, food,
    beauty and medicinal qualities, but long ago destroyed by the
    crusaders.

    "The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree," says Psalm 92.
    "They shall still bring forth fruit in old age. They shall be fat and
    flourishing."

    Well, we'll see. Dr. Sarah Sallon, who runs a project on medicinal
    plants of the Middle East, notes that the date palm in ancient times
    symbolized the tree of life. But Dr. Elaine Solowey, who germinated
    the seed and is growing it in quarantine, says plants grown from
    ancient seeds "usually keel over and die soon," having used most of
    their nutrients in remaining alive.

    The plant is now 11.8 inches tall and has produced seven leaves, one
    of which was removed for DNA testing. Radiocarbon dating in
    Switzerland on a snip of the seed showed it to be 1,990 years old,
    plus or minus 50 years. So the date seed dates from 35 B.C. to A.D.
    65, just before the famed Roman siege.

    Three date seeds were taken from Level 34 of the Masada dig. They were
    found in a storeroom, and are presumably from dates eaten by the
    defenders, Dr. Sallon says.

    Mordechai Kislef, director of botanical archeology at Bar-Ilan
    University, had some date seeds from Ehud Netzer, who excavated Masada
    in the 1970's. "They were sitting in a drawer, and when I asked for
    one, he said, 'You're mad,' but finally gave me three," Dr. Sallon
    said. "Then I gave them to Elaine, who's an expert on arid agriculture
    and dates." Dr. Solowey said: "Well, I didn't have much hope that any
    would come up, but you know how Sarah is."

    Dr. Sallon, who is a pediatric gastroenterologist trained at
    University College, London, came to Israel 20 years ago. She is the
    director of the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center at
    Hadassah Medical Organization, which she set up 10 years ago to study
    natural products and therapies, from Tibetan and Chinese medicine to
    the indigenous medicinal plants of the Middle East. The idea is to
    preserve these plants and their oral histories in a modernizing
    region, but also to domesticate them, evaluate them scientifically and
    then try to integrate them into conventional medicine.

    Dr. Solowey, who teaches agriculture and sustainable farming at the
    Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, based at Kibbutz Ketura in
    the southern Negev, works on finding new crops for arid and saline
    areas like Jordan, Gaza and Morocco. She also works with Dr. Sallon to
    domesticate indigenous plants that appear to have medicinal uses.

    Dr. Solowey grew up in the San Joaquin Valley in California and
    studied horticulture, then turned away from commercial agriculture in
    disgust, coming here in 1971. "I don't come to organic agriculture
    from the hippie side, but as a frustrated agricultural scientist," she
    said.

    "We've bred for yield and taste, but not hardiness, so we have a lot
    of plants as hardy as French poodles, so we have to spray to protect
    them, and then we pay the price," she said. "There isn't a cubic
    centimeter of water in the San Joaquin Valley that isn't polluted with
    something."

    She planted the date seeds at the end of January after trying to draw
    them out of their deep dormancy. She first soaked the seeds in hot
    water to soften the coat, then in an acid rich in hormones, then in an
    enzymatic fertilizer made of seaweed and other nutrients.

    "I've done other recalcitrant seeds," she said. "It wasn't a project
    with a high priority. I had no idea if the food in the seed was still
    good, but I put them in new pots in new potting soil and plugged them
    into drip irrigation and kind of forgot about them."

    About six weeks later, she said, "I saw the earth cracked in a pot and
    much to my astonishment, one of these came up."

    The first two leaves looked odd, she said, very flat and pale. "But
    the third looked like a date leaf with lines, and every one since has
    looked more and more normal - like it had a hard time getting out of
    the seed."

    Lotus seeds of about 1,200 years of age have been sprouted in China,
    and after the Nazis bombed London's Natural History Museum in World
    War II and a lot of water was used to put out the fire, seeds of 500
    years of age also germinated.

    "But no one had done it from 2,000 years old," Dr. Sallon said.

    In the time of Pliny, forests of date palms covered the area from Lake
    Galilee to the Dead Sea and made Jericho famous; a date palm features
    on ancient coinage, as it does on the current Israeli 10-shekel coin.

    The date palm symbolized ancient Israel; the honey of "the land of
    milk and honey" came from the date. It is praised as a tonic to
    increase longevity, as a laxative, as a cure for infections and as an
    aphrodisiac, Dr. Sallon said. But the dates of Judea were destroyed
    before the Middle Ages, and what dates Israel grows now were imported
    in the 1950's and 60's from California and originated elsewhere in the
    Middle East.

    The Prophet Muhammad considered the date of great importance for
    medicine, food, construction and income, and it is described in the
    Koran as a "symbol of goodness" associated with heaven.

    Dates need to grow 30 years to reach maturity and can live as long as
    200 years.

    But it is the female date that is considered holy, and that bears
    fruit. "Men are rather superfluous in the date industry," Dr. Sallon
    said.

    "O.K, I have a date plant," Dr. Solowey said. "If it lives, it will be
    years before we eat any dates. And that's if it's female. There's a
    50-50 chance. And if it's a male, it will just be a curiosity."