Ancient dates and their potential use in breeding.

摘要

The date palm tree, Phoenix dactylifera L., is renowned for its ability to cope with extremely harsh desert climates and to provide nutritious fruit that enables human survival under these extreme conditions. The health-contributing effects of this fruit have been proclaimed in folklore, in reports from ancient medical experts and contemporary medical studies. Ancient date cultivars in Palestine, during the period of the Second Temple and up to the Mamluk conquest, received high praise from many international experts including Theophrastus, Pliny the Elder, Strabo, and the poet Virgil, who promised his fiancee the dates of Judea. The major praise was that the Judean cultivars had fruit of much better keeping qualities than other date fruit of that time, which could not be kept for a long time. This improvement may have been the result of the selection, by the Judean date growers, of dry and semidry cultivars that had a better shelf life than the soft types although dry and semidry are found in other areas. It is suggested that this selection was carried out during the Persian period when the Jews were allowed by Cyrus to return to Judea in the second half of the sixth century BCE. The archeological data collected supports the intensive date culture in oases along the Jordan river and the Dead Sea Basin and down the Arava valley up to the Red Sea. However, these ancient date cultivars are now extinct; their only remnants are a collection of seeds and some dried produce, including baskets made from date leaves, found in archeological digs. One seed of these ancient remains was germinated by Elaine Solewey and a team of Israeli scientists. A study of the genetic profile of these ancient date seeds, as well as the less promising, but easy to test, possibility of germinating additional seedlings from these ancient seeds, may help us to learn more about the nature of these ancient cultivars, and possibly be valued for breeding purposes.