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Last update - 00:00 12/06/2008
Israeli scientists grow palm from 2,000-year-old seed at Masada
By DPA
Tags: Israeli scientists, date palm 

Israeli scientists have succeeded in getting a 2,000-year-old date
seed to sprout and grow into a palm of a native type that had been extinct for hundreds of years.

The seed - nicknamed Methusaleh after the oldest person in the Bible -was found in the ancient fortress of Masada, on a hilltop in the Judean desert by the Dead Sea where Jewish zealots committed mass suicide to avoid surrender to the Romans in the first century CE.
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Project manager Sarah Sallon hopes the palm will prove to be a fruit-bearing female, but that she will know only in a few years time, when the now more than 1.20-metre-tall sprout grows into a palm tree.

If another of the seeds found at Masada can be cultivated and proves to be male, the two trees will be able to reproduce.

Israel, which now grows only imported date species originating from countries like Morocco, Egypt and Iraq, would be able to cultivate its own native kind: the Judean date palm, or Phoenix dactylifera in Latin, hundreds of years after it died out.

It is no surprise therefore that Sallon sounds excited. According to the
first-century Roman author, zoologist and botanist Pliny the Elder, "huge" forests of date palms stretched in his time from the Sea of Galilee in what is now northern Israel to the Dead Sea in the south, she explains.

Pliny, she adds, described the Judean dates as delicious and especially large. They were also said to have medicinal properties, used against "spitting blood" - probably meaning tuberculosis - and stomach problems, including diarrhea. Sallon, who runs a natural medicine research centre at Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital, wants to study those
medicinal properties.

But after the Romans conquered the region in the first century CE and as a result of other invasions, the date palm forests, which she explains need careful and continuous cultivation, gradually died out.

By the Crusader period, or the late Middle Ages, "almost nothing was left of those plantations," Sallon explains.

"Date trees are like children. You have to look after them," she says, explaining that the Babylonians discovered 5,000 years ago how to spur pollination by manually bringing the male pollen to the female, by physically climbing the trees.

The British-born Israeli and her co-worker, plant specialist Elaine Solowey, planted Methuselah and two other date seeds found at the same location in January 2005. Only Methuselah began sprouting.

The seeds were found at Masada during the 1963-65 excavations of the fortress built in the first century BC by Jewish Roman King Herod the Great.

They were stored at room temperature for four decades by the keepers of the artifacts collection of world-renowned Israeli archeologist - and former army chief of staff - Yigael Yadin, who had led the excavations at Masada.

"In 2005 I went, and begged them to give me some seeds," says Sallon.

She believes the high summer temperatures and low precipitation at Masada may have contributed to the seeds' exceptional longevity, by minimizing the creation of free radicals.

Sallon and her co-workers sent two other date seeds found at Masada as well as fragments of the seed to the University of Zurich for radiocarbon dating, which found that they were 2,000 years old. The carbon dating also matched the historic dating of when Masada functioned as a pleasure palace for King Herod.

"To date, the oldest seed to grow into a plant was 1,300 years old and that of a lotus - found in a dried-up lake in China and cultivated at the University of California," says Sallon.

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      1.   This is old news. I read about it 2 years ago in NYTIMES! 21:44  |  historical buff 12/06/08
      2.   Like Israel - rebirth of 2000 year old extinct species! 21:50  |  Love this story 12/06/08
      3.   Isn`t that amazing Israeli technology hard at work 22:13  |  Robert/Montreal 12/06/08
      4.   Awesome! 22:22  |  Avram 12/06/08
      5.   Congratulations to a miraculous country 23:22  |  Gina 12/06/08
      6.   Chalav U`Dvash 00:24  |  Ron 13/06/08
      7.   Where`d the date forests go? 00:46  |  Scharker Yid 13/06/08
      8.   THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SEED 01:40  |  Brant 13/06/08
      9.   Can`t wait to taste the first fruits - anytime soon? 01:48  |  hungry 13/06/08
      10.   A lovely story. 02:42  |  Maureen Ann 13/06/08
      11.   ha ha ha ha! 03:28  |  Historian 13/06/08
      12.   maureen What is palestine? 03:47  |  JP 13/06/08
      13.   bitter as wormwood, Maureen Ann... 07:03  |  Akiva P 13/06/08
      14.   Maureen 07:34  |  SUV 13/06/08
      15.   great story 08:51  |  Christina 13/06/08
      16.   Maureen ann 08:53  |  Connie 13/06/08
      17.   # 14 SUV RE: MAUREN TOUCHE` BRAVO, EXCELLENT. 14:58  |  petra 14/06/08
      18.   2000 year old politics 19:50  |  Ploni 14/06/08
      19.   #8 THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SEED 09:00  |  Gerald Zang 16/06/08
      20.   אדיר, איזה יופי 00:32  |  Erez 27/12/08
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