Methuselah

Methuselah was sprouted in 2005 from a date seed over 2000 year old. It was the first ancient seed to be germinated in our project and at that time was the oldest ever to be grown!
Discovered in the 1960s during archaeologist, Prof. Yigal Yadin’s excavations of Masada, a fortress-palace built by Herod overlooking the Dead Sea, this ancient date seed was found buried under rubble close to the Northern Palace, and ruins of ancient food stores. In 2005 Dr. Sarah Sallon, founder and director of the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center at Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem, initiated a project to germinate ancient seeds recovered from local archaeological sites as part of a program to study Israel’s medicinal flora. Her “Ancient Seed Project” aimed to restore species once found in this region but now extinct.
Dr. Sallon turned to Dr. Elaine Solowey, founder of the Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the Arava Institute, who had extensive experience cultivating desert plants growing under extreme conditions. She decided to accept the challenge. Astonishingly one of the 3 seeds from Masada planted by Dr. Solowey, germinated.
Named after the oldest person mentioned in the Bible, Methuselah grew and developed as a male date palm tree and was planted in a special enclosure at Kibbutz Ketura in 2011.
Published in 2008 by Dr. Sallon in the prestigious journal Science, Methuselah quickly became a celebrity, written about widely in the media, and earning a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.