Ancient Israel was renowned for its date palm plants, which were widespread in thick forests and reportedly bore delicious fruit. The dates were a staple food for dwellers of the Judaean Desert. Sometime around the year 1300, however, a confluence of catastrophes–agricultural, economic, and climatological–killed many of the trees, and over time the palms became so uncommon that a French explorer in the 16th century doubted that the ancient date trade could ever have been particularly noteworthy. Within the following few centuries, that particular variant of date palm was extinct, and became entirely the stuff of legend.

In the mid-1960s, archaeologists at the clifftop palace of Herod the Great in Masada, Israel uncovered a 2000-year-old jar containing seeds. These turned out to be seeds of the long-extinct date palm. In 2005, researchers treated three of these seeds with fertilizer solutions and planted them in pots to see whether they were still capable of germinating. One of the seeds did indeed sprout, and it yielded a large, healthy date palm that the researchers nicknamed ‘Methuselah’ (not to be confused with the famous bristlecone pine of the same name). Within a decade Methuselah was almost ten feet tall, and producing pollen.

Date palms come in separate male and female plants, only the females being able to produce fruit. Methuselah is unfortunately male. However, scientists speculate that Methuselah could be used to fertilize a female plant of a closely related Egyptian date palm, resulting in fruit as soon as the early 2020s, offering humanity access to a legendary flavour that has not been tasted in centuries.

written by Marisa Brook

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