More on the resurrected ancient Judean date palms

PALEOBOTANY AND RESURRECTION GENOMICS: How King Solomon and the Romans Shaped the Judean Date Palm. The famed Judean dates began as one variant 2,400 years ago, by the Common Era had become something else and today, are different again (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz).

In the last decade, [Sarah] Sallon and Elaine Solowey of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura germinated date seeds that were radiocarbon-dated to between 1,800 and 2,400 years old. The seeds had been discovered by archaeologists at sites in the Judean Desert, including Masada. Seven trees grew.

The seven trees were named, from the oldest seed to the youngest: Methuselah, Hannah, Adam, Judith, Boaz, Jonah and Uriel. And lo, genetic analyses Sallon and international teams published in Science Advances in 2020, and in a 2021 paper in the journal PNAS by Muriel Gros-Balthazard and colleagues, show that these seven trees aren’t all the same type.

For PaleoJudaica posts on the work of this team on resurrecting the ancient Judean date palm, start here and follow the links. Related post here.

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