A Long-Lost Legendary Roman Fruit Tree Has Been Grown From 2,000-Year-Old Seeds (sciencealert.com) 38
"Scientists have cultivated plants from date palm seeds that languished in ancient ruins and caves for 2,000 years," writes ScienceAlert.
schwit1 shared their report: This remarkable feat confirms the long-term viability of the kernels once ensconced in succulent Judean dates, a fruit cultivar lost for centuries. The results make it an excellent candidate for studying the longevity of plant seeds. From those date palm saplings, the researchers have begun to unlock the secrets of the highly sophisticated cultivation practices that produced the dates praised by Herodotus, Galen, and Pliny the Elder.
First, they collected fragments of the seed shells still clinging to the roots of the plants. These were perfect for radiocarbon dating -- which confirmed the seeds date back to between 1,800 and 2,400 years ago. Then, the researchers could conduct genetic analyses of the plants themselves, comparing them to a genetic database of current data palms. This showed exchanges of genetic material from eastern date palms from the Middle East, and western date palms from North Africa.
Indeed, the researchers found that the ancient seeds were up to 30 percent larger than date seeds today, which probably meant the fruit was larger, too.
And, of course, there's the seemingly miraculous germination after so many centuries. As anyone who buys seeds for their garden knows, seeds deteriorate; the longer you have a packet of seeds sitting in storage, the fewer will germinate when you finally plant them. If scientists can discover how the date seeds retained their viability for so long, that could have important implications for agriculture.
First, they collected fragments of the seed shells still clinging to the roots of the plants. These were perfect for radiocarbon dating -- which confirmed the seeds date back to between 1,800 and 2,400 years ago. Then, the researchers could conduct genetic analyses of the plants themselves, comparing them to a genetic database of current data palms. This showed exchanges of genetic material from eastern date palms from the Middle East, and western date palms from North Africa.
Indeed, the researchers found that the ancient seeds were up to 30 percent larger than date seeds today, which probably meant the fruit was larger, too.
And, of course, there's the seemingly miraculous germination after so many centuries. As anyone who buys seeds for their garden knows, seeds deteriorate; the longer you have a packet of seeds sitting in storage, the fewer will germinate when you finally plant them. If scientists can discover how the date seeds retained their viability for so long, that could have important implications for agriculture.
So how soon can we... (Score:1)
...make some type of alcoholic drink out of this so we can get ABSOLUTELY WASTED out of our minds at a raging kegger?.
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It's all fun and games to troll him, but really, he needs to just stop posting, get off social media, and find something to do with his life that doesn't involve tricking people into clicking on referral links.
Leave him alone, and encourage him to leave us alone. Thank you.
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Stop posting. Please.
Herodotus (Score:3)
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They aren't Judean dates. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:They aren't Judean dates. (Score:5, Interesting)
Psychopaths will attach themselves to any group formed for any purpose. They will seek to pervert the course of the group, so that it no longer serves the original purpose and only serves the greed, ego and lust of the psychopath. Does not matter the group or the purpose, the psychopaths will conspires to pervert the group to serve the greed, ego and lusts of the psychopaths.
Revolution is a rich feeding ground for the parasitic psychopaths, on both sides of the fight and they cause the most carnage on both sides of the fight and will kill their own to gain advantage.
In the modern era, as we know the genetic nature of psychopath and how it alters their brain function to shift them from being a social species to a parasitic sub-species, we should simply test for them and exclude them from positions where they will cause harm.
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Too late, psychopaths made our modern society into an ideal breeding ground for psychopaths over the course of a few decades, and if us non-psychopaths don't work together to undo these changes hard and fast, then the future is nothing but a post-human hell meant to maximize the greed/ego/lust fulfilment of a small in-group of psychopaths.
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Psychopaths are more-welcome in some movements than in others.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Life of Brian shows how the left's worst enemy is other leftists. The right-wing Romans build things and improve Judea, while Reg and the others can do nothing but complain.
It's a pity the film can't be screened any more. It's been cancelled because of those scenes where Reg ridicules the man for wanting to be a woman. "Where's the fetus going to gestate? Going to keep it in a box?" Utter transphobia. Hate speech.
Wouldn't a Judean date (Score:2)
Not the oldest seed to be regrown (Score:4, Informative)
This 32,000 year old Siberian seed embryo [nationalgeographic.com] were grown to viable mature plants, although scientists extracted the embryo from immature seeds to do so. The reason is that the arctic squirrel that hoarded the seeds, nipped them so they don't germinate. So scientists had to extract the embryo from immature ones. Not exactly throwing them in soil and watering them, but still impressive.
Monsato is on the hunt. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is perfectly legal for a company to make the customers buy its product again and again.
Ordinary flesh and blood citizens might want long lasting seeds. But they are not important.
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Fruit trees are usually propagated by cuttings. (Score:5, Informative)
That's the only way to ensure consistent results. The whole point of sexual reproduction is to produce diversity in offspring and farmers want consistency. So every Fuji apple is produced from a tree that is in effect a clone of every other Fuji apple tree. If you plant a seed from a Fuji apple, the tree that grows from it won't produce Fuji apples; it may well produce some kind of crabapple.
I'm not sure whether the ancient farmers had the technique for propagating date palms. I looked it up and *modern* farmers definitely definitely use vegetative propagation, but I didn't find anything about pre-modern farming practices.
If ancient farmers propagated from seed, they certainly would have got very different results from different plants, and some of those plants would likely have been culled.
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Palms grow like grasses, new layer formed at the root and pushes up the plant already grown. The term "basal" (adjective form of base) growth comes my mind, but I am not confident that is the right term, and palms belong to grass family.
Fruit trees like mangoes (and probably apples and pears) grow at the tips. Such trees are amenable to cutting and grafting. I would imagine it would be difficult to propagate plams by cutting.
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Yes, palms grow basically like grasses because both are monocotyledons. Palms aren't grasses, though, and if you want to call them by a common name, that would be commelinids . :> That clade [wikipedia.org] includes such diverse plants as grasses, palms, ginger, banana, pineapple, sedges and spiderworts, among others.
Some palms produce shoots from their roots. I think you really can't graft palms.
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If you plant a seed from a Fuji apple, the tree that grows from it won't produce Fuji apples; it may well produce some kind of crabapple.
As Fuji apples are grown in plantations, chances are the flower the fruit came from was inseminated by another Fuji apple flower -> the seeds will grow Fuji apple trees.
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Fuji apples, liket many commercially-grown apple varieties are self-sterile. Fruiting will require a compatible pollinator, which will most probably be a white-flowered crabapple like Malus perpetu Everest (as they are compatible with all domesticated apples).
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That is actually interesting.
Not really self sterile, but they can not self fertilize, as male and female organs ripe at different times.
So you are right:
https://homeguides.sfgate.com/... [sfgate.com]
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If you plant a seed from a Fuji apple, the tree that grows from it won't produce Fuji apples; it may well produce some kind of crabapple. As Fuji apples are grown in plantations, chances are the flower the fruit came from was inseminated by another Fuji apple flower -> the seeds will grow Fuji apple trees.
Nope. A Fuji apple fertilizing another Fuji apple does not produce another Fuji apple, the genes resort and a different variety of apple will be produced - hence the need for cloning.
No tree fruit (which includes nuts) reproduces true to seed. None.
This is different from annual plants that can be developed into open pollinated varieties that maintain their characteristics from generation to generation. The reason is that the generation time is so short, a single year typically (but can be multiple times a y
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Incorrect. All apple varieties that I'm aware of act like hybrids; take a McIntosh and have it fertilized by another McIntosh and you have no idea WTF you're going to get. Apples are legendary for this; this is why all varietals are propagated through cuttings.
Sown apple seeds are useful for two things: cider (the alcoholic kind,) and culling through thousands of trees to find the one mutant that tastes good eaten.
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It's a bit more complicated :) Not a botanist, but I'm very interested in horticulture.
Most commercially grown species are effectively clones through cuttings, air-layers or grafting. There's reasons other than variation for it: a clone will flower the next year as the tissue is already mature and the scion will also often be grafted on a beneficial rootstock (increases disease/insect resistance, changes the soil requirements, ...). A tree grown from seed will take years before reaching maturity and produci
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If ancient farmers propagated from seed, they certainly would have got very different results from different plants, and some of those plants would likely have been culled.
They would necessarily have culled about half of them since about half of the offspring would be males. In modern orchards 2-4% of the plants are male to pollinate the fruits and clonal selection of males for high pollen production is followed.
Most palms only reproduce from seed (the coconut palm for example), the date palm is unusual in that it sends out aerial shoots that can be removed to produce new plants (and should be removed for practical orchard care). So almost certainly shoot transplantation was
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Data palms, your best source of juicy delicious binary fruits. When buying, select fruits with an even distribution of 1's than 0's and keep an eye out for bit rot.
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I'm going to grow a whole orchard of data palms, and put them on the blockchain.
OMG! I'm finally gonna be RICH!!!! HODL! HODL! HODL!
Excellent. I approve of this. (Score:1)
This is what science was meant for. Now find me some Ambrosia!
Pro-Roman bias (Score:2)
Doesn't it say something that the clickbait headline calls this a "Roman Fruit Tree" when it's actually Judean? Sure, the Romans ate it, but it's because they controlled Judea at the time. The article clearly says that they found these seeds in Palestine, however, hence nowhere near Rome.
Personally I don't understand this Roman marketing angle. I'd buy and eat the fruit either way. And wouldn't it sell better if you call it a Holy Land date? (In fact, we religious people might even fight over it in the supe
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Because the legend was Roman.
And if it was from Palestine, it was not Judean. Judea was the country that bordered Palestine to the east. (The border between Israel and Judea was a few miles north of Jerusalem.)
Roman Fruit Tree (Score:1)