Seeds originated from Masada
Photo: AP
Palm cultivated from 2,000-year-old seed
Researchers grow date palm from ancient seed found at Masada fortress; hope to reveal medicinal qualities for future
JERUSALEM - Researchers have germinated a sapling date palm from seeds 2,000 years old, in a bid to find new medicines that would benefit future generations.
Sarah Sallon, of the Louis Borick Natural Medicine Research Center in Jerusalem, said she and her colleagues used seeds found in archaeological excavations at the ancient mountain fortress of Masada, where ancient Jewish rebels chose suicide over capture by Roman legions in 73 A.D.
She said they were the oldest seeds ever brought back to life.
"A lotus seed was germinated (in China) after 1,200 years, but nothing has been germinated coming from this far back, not to 2,000 years," she said.
Carbon dating of a fragment from the Masada seeds put their age at between 1,940 and 2,040 years.
Hope for the future
The palm plant, nicknamed Methusaleh after the biblical figure said to have lived for 969 years, is now about 12 inches (30 centimeters) tall.
Sallon and her colleagues have sent one of its leaves for DNA analysis in the hope that it may reveal medicinal qualities that have disappeared from modern cultivated varieties.
Date palms now grown in Israel were imported from California and are of a strain originating in Iraq, she said. The Judean date prized in antiquity but extinct until Methusaleh's awakening, might have had very different properties to the modern variant.
Sallon said the project is more than a curiosity. She and her colleagues hope it may hold promise for the future, like the anti-malarial treatment artemisinin, developed out of traditional Chinese plant treatment, and a cancer medicine made from the bark of the Pacific Yew tree.
Both males and females valuable
"Dates were highly medicinal. They had an enormous amount of use in ancient times for infections, for tumors, " she said. "We think that ancient medicines of the past can be the medicines of the future."
If the plant survives, it will take some 30 years to bear fruit, provided it turns out to be female. Sallon, however, said that even a male would provide food for thought.
"The genetics of this plant will be very interesting whatever sex it is," she said. "It's the females that produce the fruit...but the males are very valuable as well, they're no less valuable than the females."
