When archaeologists dug at Masada in the 1960s — the fortress above the Dead Sea — they found date palm seeds in a storeroom under Herod's palace. They packed them away and put them in storage.
They stayed there for around forty years.
Radiocarbon dating later put the seeds somewhere between 155 BC and 64 CE. In 2005 a botanist named Elaine Solowey, at the Arava Institute in Israel, slowly hydrated one in an ordinary baby bottle warmer, and planted it.
It sprouted.
It came up male, so they named it Methuselah, after the oldest man in the Bible. It is the oldest seed anyone has ever brought back to life.
Six more have followed: Hannah, from Wadi Makukh; Adam, from Masada; and Jonah, Uriel, Boaz and Judith, from Qumran. In June 2021, Methuselah's pollen reached Hannah, and she gave fruit — 111 dates in the first harvest, almost 700 in the second.
The Judean date had been gone from the world since the 14th century. A tree erased by climate and time, grown back from a seed that slept two thousand years in a jar.
Sources:
- Judean date palm, Wikipedia
- Six new ancient date trees, Arava Institute
- Methuselah Palm Grown from 2,000-Year-Old Seed is a Father, National Geographic 2015 (archived)
— Abigaëlle