Dead Sea dates grown from 2000-year-old seeds
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
I know plants typically have a high ploidity (multiple chromosome copies - humans only have a factor of 2, whereas bananas have 4 or higher [1]). Is that how this works?
[0] https://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.1...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170907-the-mystery-of-t...
Cyrene's, an ancient Greek city on the north African coast, entire economy was based on growing silphium, and the heart shaped icon of its seeds can be seen on its coins.
Silphium is often refered to as laser in Latin books such as the famous De Re Coquinara. There's a very close substitute spice originally from Persia but now more widely used in India called asafoetida named for its stench. Apparently the taste is very similar, but the intense smell isn't! Though it only reeks uncooked. By the late republic to early empire (which happens to be the primary time period we have for extant literature) Silphium had already become rare and soon died out. Though there's reports of early church monks sending each other seeds & stalks.
It's too bad Libya is a warzone in our time, and the area comprising the ruined Cyrene was recently under ISIS control. I wonder if there was any damage or looting at the site.
Would be like finding a californian dwarf elephant again.
Any measurement can have errors of methodology, and a wrong measurement does not have any value. Don't worship numbers just because they seem fancy or fit with a narrative. They are just that, a number.
Without a genetical analysis we can not know if a plant variety is lost, or just forgotten, or a clone of a extant variety buried ten years ago. Show me the analysis before to start talking abour old ruins, caravans and lost cities.
I didn't find the article but... first of all, I have a problem with an object being soaked in fertilizer, watered, and then dated after an external porous shell clinging from the new roots.
Just does not feel like rigth science.
Would be like measuring how old are the matherials in an flemish painting after covering it with a new a layer of modern acrilic. Too much new error factors and contaminants influencing the results over the table.
Why they didn't just removed a small posterior chunk of the seed and then put it apart before to germinate the rest?
Second: What about doing a standard genetical analysis?. Are this larger seeds genetically close to the modern larger varieties that Israel has being introduced into the market in the last five years?
Is that really what it suggests? I'm under the impression the flesh:seed ratio of a fruit tends to go up when a fruit is domesticated over long periods of time. Wild bananas have huge seeds but the seeds in domesticated bananas are almost not there.
Essentially I was saying 'sure, there's a correlation, isn't there also causation, aren't we the cause?' (which isn't the way around that's usually said!)
Everyone thought he was saying "are you sure it suggests that? It seems an odd to me because flesh grows over time, so it is a really bizarre conclusion if true!"
But OP didn't mean that. Instead this is what OP meant:
">> The successful seeds were all several centimeters long, 30% larger than modern date seeds, suggesting dates that were significantly larger than modern varieties.
"Actually, maybe it's not that the flesh was larger - but rather, the seed was! The flesh could have remained the same size."
OP then justified why he thought this was just as plausible, by mentioning wild bananas (Google image search "wild banana seed") as an example of large, ugly seeds in a same-sized plant.
More generally, yes, over time you are going to get more of what you're selecting for. Which may or may not be flesh:seed ratio.
The cool thing in this instance is that the trees are growing, so we may get to observe them first hand.
In theory you could probably do this with a 2,000-year-old platypus egg that had been preserved in amber. But otherwise mammals just tend to have really short shelf lives for these things.
My guess: ISO-8601.
That may depend on how "domesticated" the date is, although I suppose your statement could be in strict conformance with the Law of Identity.
Other domesticated fruits and vegetables are nothing like the wild version of the same. Notable examples include apples and tomatoes (the latter of which originated in South America - image Italy with no red sauce?).
I'm seriously considering doing some grafting myself this year. The place I go has probably 1000+ trees spread out over a couple hundred acres. There is a huge range of variation in terms of flavor. But my favorite ones for making cider are the pips (small, when fullsize, maybe the size of an oblong plumb). They make by far the best cider.
https://priceonomics.com/the-johnny-appleseed-business-model...