
Dead Sea dates grown from 2000-year-old seeds - big_chungus
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/dead-sea-dates-grown-2000-year-old-seeds
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echelon
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...](https://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11555)

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

~~~
jessriedel
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.

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siphium
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium)

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

Would be like finding a californian dwarf elephant again.

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

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

~~~
JoeAltmaier
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.

~~~
pvaldes
"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.

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

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

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annoyingnoob
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.

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

~~~
pixl97
DNA rewrites itself all the time... we just cant change it at will, much, yet.

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

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

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

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

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pvaldes
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?

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catalogia
> _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
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).

~~~
derrasterpunkt
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.

~~~
OJFord
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!)

~~~
logicallee
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.

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

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

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

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rriepe
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.

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leptoniscool
Other old seeds: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_viable_seed#Carbon-
da...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_viable_seed#Carbon-dated)

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imvetri
I was hoping to find how it tasted like.

~~~
nkozyra
My guess: like a date.

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neuronic
I wonder what its format was like.

My guess: ISO-8601.

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

~~~
apodysophilia
ab urbe condita MMDCCLXXIII

