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Palm Grown From 2 000-Year-Old Seed

Methuselah

A male date palm tree that sprouted from a 2,000-year-old seed nearly a decade ago is thriving today, according to the Israeli researcher who is cultivating the historic plant, Elaine Solowey.

In 2005, Solowey, an expert in desert agriculture, germinated the ancient seed, which was recovered decades earlier from an archaeological excavation at Masada, a historic mountainside fortress. The seed had spent years in a researcher’s drawer in Tel Aviv. The plant is now about ten years old and ten feet (three meters) tall.

In the years since the palm first sprouted, Solowey has successfully germinated a handful of other date palms from ancient seeds recovered at archaeological sites around the Dead Sea. “I’m trying to figure out how to plant an ancient date grove,” she says.

To do that, she’ll need to grow a female plant from an ancient seed. So far, at least two of the other ancient seeds that have sprouted are female.

In addition to Solowey’s hopes of establishing an orchard of ancient dates, she and colleagues are interested in studying the plants to see if they have any unique medicinal properties.

In 2012, scientists in Russia were able to grow a plant from 32,000-year-old seeds that had been buried by an Ice Age squirrel in Siberia.