Two thousand year old seed germinates

A two thousand year old date palm seed (the pit of the date), found in the Masada fortress in Israel in 1965 and planted three years ago, has grown into a healthy four-foot tall seedling, the oldest seed ever to germinate. According to Wendy Hansen in the Los Angeles Times:

The tree has been named Methuselah after the oldest person in the Bible. It is the only living Judean date palm, the last link to the vast date palm forests that once shaded and nourished the region.

The article is clearly written and leaves no answered questions, except for one: it doesn’t tell us what happened to the Judean date palm forests. How did they completely die out?

- end of initial entry -

David H. from Oregon writes:

Much of the agricultural impoverishment of the Middle East is due to over-grazing by goats and consequent soil erosion. I have seen a picture of a stand of the famed cedars of Lebanon, surrounded by a stone wall to keep the goats out. Inside the wall, the cedars stand tall as they have for centuries. Outside the wall is bare ground with hardly a blade of grass.

One may ask why the archaeologists are always digging things up, why do things from the ancient world always seem to be buried? The answer is siltation due to soil erosion taking place upstream. This accounts in part for the decline in fertility of what used to be the Fertile Crescent.

A source for the cedars of Lebanon picture is p. 64 of Topsoil and Civilization by Vernon Carter and Tom Dale (1955, 1974.) “Civilized man has marched across the face of the earth and left a desert in his footprints.”—

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 17, 2008 01:12 AM | Send