The 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-1.1...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploidy#

Maybe, 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.

Can 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

The 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.

It might not have seeds, but have spread through cuttings.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170907-the-mystery-of-t...

Extinction is forever. We should not understimate the weight of this fact.

Would be like finding a californian dwarf elephant again.

...except that's the point of the OP - this date is no longer extinct.

Phoenix dactilifera never went extinct (and the origin of this date is still questionable IMHO).

This variety was gone, for 2000 years. The origin date was pretty firmly established. 'IMHO' is worth much less than a measurement, which indicated from 2200 to 1800 years.

"IMHO" there are a lot of well known problems with carbone datation. You can read about it in scientific journals and make your own opinion.

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.

So theres uncertainty in dating, and its only 1000 years extinct? This is more FUD.

Keep thinking about the problem and you will eventualy find the big, huge, ginormous, elephant in the room.

I'm intrigued by this plant. I hope they find a specimen or a way to resurrect it.

There's a plant (Justicia gendarussa) in Indonesia that seems to work: http://www.humanosphere.org/science/2013/04/male-birth-contr...

My first few reads of your comment made me think you were saying the Romans went extinct due to eating too much birth control.

You 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.

there is a tradeoff here though: that floppy can be erased and rewritten easily. dna not so much.

DNA rewrites itself all the time... we just cant change it at will, much, yet.

Well, we might in 2000 years.

Chances are that I won't be here to see it.

maybe you'll be on the floppy

When we set the upper limit of PC-DOS at 640K, we thought nobody would ever need that much memory. — William Gates

I would read that book.

previous HN discussion on the actual paper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22262855

There are other species of plants whose seeds can germinate after a ridiculously long time. Nelumbo nucifera, for example. Still, it is remarkeable.

Though not extinction, widespread use of birth control could be argued to have been a contributing factor in the fall of Rome.

Or, a territory too large to actually defend, rampant corrution and barbarian hordes?

I 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?

> 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.

Bananas are a bad example of this. They don't follow the ordinary selection processes during domestication - the ones we commonly consume are hybridized cultivars with triploid genetics; they're infertile. They reproduce asexually, so all bananas belonging to the same cultivar are clones of each other.

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.

They've been working on the same with açaí with some success.

You 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).

But 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.

Perhaps 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!)

It was my suspicion that the change is a result of deliberate human action, but I am not a biologist or a farmer so that's not something I'm certain of. The trend, not the cause of the trend, is what seems more important in this case.

I 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.

i.e. the seeds could have been cultivated to be smaller over time.

It'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.

Strictly speaking, we aren't cultivating banana varieties any more. In the last 100 years there have only been two that have been commercially successful, Gros Michel and Cavandish, and they are grown from cuttings rather than seeds. The Gros Michel was nearly completely wiped out by fungus, and the Cavendish is living on borrowed time for the same reason. Hopefully someone will come up with a new variety soon.

Possibly, but ...

The cool thing in this instance is that the trees are growing, so we may get to observe them first hand.

It'll be a while before we see any fruit produced from them to know for sure. Makes sense to me that modern date seeds would be smaller, especially considering how huge they already are.

Wonderful nature, won't stop to impress us. Amazing how seeds can last that long!

Why only plant's seeds have the ability to survive for so long? Why not mammals?

Mammal "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.

Other old seeds: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_viable_seed#Carbon-da...

I was hoping to find how it tasted like.

My guess: like a date.

I wonder what its format was like.

My guess: ISO-8601.

Why, it's using Roman numerals of course ;)

ab urbe condita MMDCCLXXIII

> 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?).

While 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.

How do wild Apple and tomatoes look and taste?

All 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.

Interesting 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...

There 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)

- Part of the Dead Sea coast was in pre-1967 Israel.

- This comment, imputing a very negative motivation of sheer spitefulness, is offensive.

By your logic, Jordan too is occupying "Palestinian" land. Is this one of the reasons Jordanians are occupying this land?

The fact that you don't say this reveals your true agenda.

Much 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

> 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.