“Ancient Seeds of Perseverance: How 2,000-Year-Old Discoveries from the Dead Sea Scroll Caves Are Breathing Life into Today’s Forests”
Led by Sarah Sallon, a doctor at Hadassah Medical Center, the team’s experiment was a success and they managed to grow their first plant out of these ancient seeds, a date palm tree they named Methuselah. The name refers to a figure in the Bible who lived until the age of 969.
Sallon admitted that she didn’t expect the experiment would work.
But it did. Fast forward to 2020, and Methuselah now has six contemporaries named Adam, Hannah, Uriel, Boaz, Jonah, and Judith. Similar to their botanic predecessor, all six date palm plants came from ancient seeds and were grown in recent years.
Sallon et al., SciAdv, 2020The newly sprouted date trees, all grown from 2,000-year-old seeds.
The success of the more recent plant-growing experiment was important to do so that the team could document the progress of the plant’s growth properly (which they failed to do the first time since they had low hopes of the ancient seeds being viable at all).
The second experiment was also important to prove that their first effort wasn’t just a fluke — which it clearly wasn’t. Their remarkable new study was published in the journal Science Advances.
For the team’s recent study, they collected seed specimens from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, many of which were sourced from the region’s archeological sites.
Some of the seeds were more well-preserved than others and therefore better suited for the experiment. In total, the scientists planted 32 of the best-preserved seeds in a small kibbutz in southern Israel.
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