Spitball Army

Friday, June 13, 2008
2,000-year-old seed is oldest to germinate
By Wendy Hansen
Los Angeles Times

Scientists using radiocarbon dating have confirmed that a Judean date palm seed found in the ruins of Masada and planted three years ago is 2,000 years old – the oldest seed ever to germinate.

The seed has grown into a healthy, 4-foot-tall seedling, surpassing the previous record for oldest germinated seed – a 1,300-year-old Chinese lotus, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Science.

The little tree has been names Methuselah after the oldest person in the Hebrew Bible.  It is now the only living Judean date palm and the last link to the date palm forests that once shaded and nourished the Middle Eastern region.

Dr. Sarah Sallon, who directs the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center in Jerusalem, became interested in the ancient date palm as a possible source of medicines.  She enlisted Dr. Elaine Solowey of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura to coax the seeds out of dormancy.

One sprouted.  Scientists initially estimated its age at about 2,000 years old based on carbon dating of other seeds found at the site, but they had no way of directly testing the planted seed without risking its chance of survival.

After the Methuselah seed germinated, Solowey found fragments of the seed shell clinging to the roots – enough for dating.

The shell fragments initially dated to A.D. 295, give or take 50 years, but a small percentage of “modern” carbon incorporated as the seed germinated made it appear 250 to 300 years younger.  Correcting for this factor, the researchers reported that the seed dates from 60 B.C. to A.D. 95, similar to the other seeds from the site.

This story was edited down to fit on the inside front page of the June 13th edition of The Birmingham News.  I almost missed it.  Then it got me to thinking…

It’s the 4th of July.  You’ve gone to an all-day cookout/ball game/3-legged race/beer bust/fireworks display.  Sometime during the day, you glom onto an enormous slice of red, juicy watermelon.  You devour it with relish, spitting seeds onto the ground left and right.  Maybe you’re a little neater than that, and you just spit the watermelon seeds into a Dixie Cup, which makes its way into a garbage can and, eventually, into a landfill.  Or perhaps you’re just a little O-C, and stick each seed into the pocket of your Bermuda shorts, dumping them that evening into the compost pile behind the recycling bins in your back yard.

Over time, you die, your family dies, your home disappears, possibly even your neighborhood.  The U.S. returns to a natural state after the catastrophic climate event.  Forests re-populate, highways fall apart, English becomes the secondary language.  Someone conducts an archaeological dig at the site of your house and finds all manner of interesting artifact, including a clump of seeds preserved inside of a cylindrical object made of aluminum alloy, containing traces of Ethyl Alcohol.  The seeds get passed on to an agricultural department at the subterranean research facility.  They induce one of them to grow, to propagate, and they are planted as a test crop in a floating hothouse.  This is how people in the year 4,108 come to enjoy the exact same taste of watermelon that you enjoyed on that hedonistic 4th of July in the early 21st century.  Except that they aren’t yet aware of its utility as a sexual enhancement supplement.

The religious implications of the B.C./A.D. crossover date mentioned in the L.A. Times article didn’t escape me, of course.  It is indeed nothing short of miraculous that we can today potentially eat food from one of the same trees that may have nourished or sheltered Yeshua Ben Josef or members of his community.  That thought gives one a renewed reverence for the passage of time, of history, of the permanence and impermanence of things.

What will they think of us in the year 4,108, as they sit under a solar dome with watermelon juice running down their chins?