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Dead Sea dates grown from 2000-year-old seeds
- imvetri 7y agoI was hoping to find how it tasted like.
- nkozyra 7y agoMy guess: like a date.
- neuronic 7y agoI wonder what its format was like. My guess: ISO-8601.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aruggirello 7y agoWhy, it's using Roman numerals of course ;)
- apodysophilia 7y agoab urbe condita MMDCCLXXIII
- generalpass 7y ago> My guess: like a date. 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?).
- webmobdev 7y agoHow do wild Apple and tomatoes look and taste?
- RosanaAnaDana 7y agoAll over the place. Really a grab bag of genetic material that subsequently creates a huge range of variation. Apples in particular demonstrate this. Every Fall I spend a couple weekends harvesting feral apples at an abandoned township near where I live (for pressing into cider). Every tree is unique and highly variable. Modern eating apples are always reproduced through grafting, whereas apples that have gone feral are all over the map (and they will readily mate with pears, making it even more complex). 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.
- mark-r 7y agoInteresting fact: Johnny Appleseed spread apple trees by planting seeds rather than grafting. So the apples he left behind weren't good for much except making hard cider. https://priceonomics.com/the-johnny-appleseed-business-model/ https://priceonomics.com/the-johnny-appleseed-business-model...
- nkozyra 7y agoWhile I accept wide variance between wild and cultivated (and even between cultivated varieties) I feel confident that this date would taste more like a generic "date" than, say, a raisin, melon or squash.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nayefc 7y agoThe Dead Sea area in Jordan & Palestine is one of two (the other being a small area in California) that can sustain growing the best type of dates in the world. This is one of the reasons why Israel colonises this part of the Dead Sea; to prevent the Palestinians from owning a major export of their ancestral lands.
- ilammy 7y ago> The Dead Sea area in Jordan & Palestine is one of two (the other being a small area in California) that can sustain growing the best type of dates in the world. Somehow I can't stop reading this the wrong way.
- mikorym 7y agoThere is another place where you can do that, but it is a peaceful place and I won't tell you where it is. Also, I don't agree with your interpretation. Investing in dates is a lifetime investment. I doubt that this would be the exact reason for their politics in that area. If you plant a date tree today, you can expect to start having positive cash flow in > 15 years from now. I think there are more immediate considerations (or other crops with a quicker turnaround) like maybe nuclear bombs and guns. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_(song)
- blasteye 7y agoMuch of that comment is political in nature. Calling it palestine & colonization is disputable. Technically the Israelites inhabited the land before the Palestinians. Such land was part of Judea & Samaria, which the romans conquered, kicked out the Israelites. In modern times the Israelites won back much of the land in a war of aggression against them. It's akin to saying that the Native Americans who lived in their reservations were attacked by the surrounding cities. The native americans won, and in the battles managed to extended their reservations to a greater % of their historical lands before the Americans kicked them out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea#Biblical_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea#Biblical_period
- josh_fyi 7y ago- Part of the Dead Sea coast was in pre-1967 Israel. - This comment, imputing a very negative motivation of sheer spitefulness, is offensive.
- catalogia 7y ago> The successful seeds were all several centimeters long, 30% larger than modern date seeds, suggesting dates that were significantly larger than modern varieties. 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.
- OJFord 7y agoYou make that sound like merely an observed behaviour, but isn't that because that's what we're selecting for? We eat banana flesh, not banana seeds, so we're cultivating varieties that are fleshier (among other desirable properties, such as productivity, and taste of the flesh of course).
- derrasterpunkt 7y agoBut isn’t that what he said? To put it in your words: we eat dates, not date seeds, so we‘re cultivating varieties that are fleshier. Less seed, more date.
- thatcat 7y agoIt's possible larger varieties previously existed and fell dormant, then later the domestic varieties started with a smaller fruit and the genetics for larger fruit were no longer in the active gene pool of known varieties.
- OJFord 7y agoPerhaps I misread, but to me 'tends to go up' makes it sound like an observed incidental effect, rather than a deliberate action. 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!)
- logicallee 7y agoI think everyone misread, including me. 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.
- siphium 7y agoCan you imagine the implications if someone can find a seed from that birth control plant(1) the roman's ate to extinction? (1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
- dr_dshiv 7y agoIt might not have seeds, but have spread through cuttings. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170907-the-mystery-of-the-lost-roman-herb https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170907-the-mystery-of-t...
- bobowzki 7y agoI'm intrigued by this plant. I hope they find a specimen or a way to resurrect it.
- donatzsky 7y agoThere's a plant (Justicia gendarussa) in Indonesia that seems to work: http://www.humanosphere.org/science/2013/04/male-birth-control-made-in-indonesia/ http://www.humanosphere.org/science/2013/04/male-birth-contr...
- daveFNbuck 7y agoMy first few reads of your comment made me think you were saying the Romans went extinct due to eating too much birth control.
- pushswap 7y agoThe seeds are believed to be the source of the heart shaped icon used throughout history (itself having little resemblance to the shape of our actual hearts). 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.
- geniium 7y agoWonderful nature, won't stop to impress us. Amazing how seeds can last that long!
- myth_drannon 7y agoprevious HN discussion on the actual paper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22262855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22262855
- leptoniscool 7y agoOther old seeds: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_viable_seed#Carbon-dated https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_viable_seed#Carbon-da...
- harsher 7y agoThere are other species of plants whose seeds can germinate after a ridiculously long time. Nelumbo nucifera, for example. Still, it is remarkeable.
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoThough not extinction, widespread use of birth control could be argued to have been a contributing factor in the fall of Rome.
- progre 7y agoOr, a territory too large to actually defend, rampant corrution and barbarian hordes?
- annoyingnoob 7y agoYou will never see, "DOS booted from 2000-year-old floppy". That is some amazing staying power and a great outcome. I wonder what else we can bring back.
- modzu 7y agothere is a tradeoff here though: that floppy can be erased and rewritten easily. dna not so much.
- pixl97 7y agoDNA rewrites itself all the time... we just cant change it at will, much, yet.
- sandoooo 7y agoWell, we might in 2000 years.
- annoyingnoob 7y agoChances are that I won't be here to see it.
- abacadaba 7y agomaybe you'll be on the floppy
- annoyingnoob 7y agoWhen we set the upper limit of PC-DOS at 640K, we thought nobody would ever need that much memory. — William Gates
- annoyingnoob 7y agoI would read that book.
- echelon 7y agoThe half life of DNA is reported to be 521 years in bone [0]. I'm shocked that there hasn't been a lot of accumulated deleterious mutation or damage here. 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-1.11555 https://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.1... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploidy# https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploidy#
- jessriedel 7y agoMaybe, although this wasn't bone, and I think other conditions can lead to better preservation. They have been able to extract useful info from samples that are ~1M years old.
- myth_drannon 7y agoWhy only plant's seeds have the ability to survive for so long? Why not mammals?
- rriepe 7y agoMammal "seeds" (gametes or zygotes) never evolved to be outside the body for any period of time. 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.
- pvaldes 7y agoI feel skeptical about this assertion, probably there is a much simpler non magical explanation. 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?