June 14, 2008	Saturday	Jamadi-us-Sani 09, 1429

WASHINGTON: Just over three years old and about 1.2 meters tall, Methuselah is growing well.

“It’s lovely,” Dr Sarah Sallon said, speaking of the date palm whose parents may have provided food for the besieged Jews at Masada some 2,000 years ago.

The little tree was sprouted in 2005 from a seed recovered from Masada, where rebelling Jews committed suicide rather than surrender to Roman attackers.

Radiocarbon dating of seed fragments clinging to its root, as well as other seeds found with it that did not sprout, indicate they were about 2,000 years old, the oldest seed known to have been sprouted and grown.

Sallon, director of the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center at Hadassah Medical Organisation in Israel, updates the saga of Methuselah in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science.

One thing they do not know yet is whether the tree is a boy or girl. Date palms differ by sex, but experts cannot tell the difference until the tree is six or seven years old, Sallon said.

She hopes there will be a chance to use the tree to restore the extinct Judean date palm, once prized not only for its fruit but also for medicinal uses.

The researchers have had a look at the plant’s DNA, however, and found it shares just over half its genes with modern date cultivars.—AP