With Natalie Roser:
Ancient wild date palms cling tightly to the soil of the Ein Shaviv oasis in the Arava (located south of the Dead Sea), and to one another. These are not the elegant, domesticated palms familiar from neatly kept plantations, standing in orderly rows and waiting for harvest. Here, the trees form untamed clusters packed tightly along the streambed, dozens at a time, intertwined in dense braids of branches, crowns, offshoots and shoots, until it is impossible to tell where one tree ends and another begins, which was born and which is dying. The flowing spring water carries a pleasant scent, and the ground is layered with a tough carpet of fronds and leaves shed over thousands of years we call history.
This is no exaggeration. A single date palm lives for about 90 years, but the palm colony as a whole is thousands of years old and, according to new research, deserves to be called the ‘mother of the date palm’, a nod to the ‘mother of wheat’ discovered by Aaron Aaronsohn in Rosh Pina some 120 years ago.
The palms growing here belong to a rare species never before documented in this region. They are the original Land of Israel date palms, as they existed before humans domesticated them about 6,000 years ago. Just as traces of Neanderthal DNA can be found in all of us, part of the genetics of this wild palm appears in every cultivated date. At the heart of every Medjool date we eat is an ancient palm.
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