'Biblical' tree brought back from the dead

Have you ever wondered whether science could allow us to bring an ancient species back from the dead? Well, Sarah Sallon and her colleagues in Israel have been doing precisely that. The evidence speaks for itself in the form of a long forgotten plant with Biblical roots. Chris Smith first met Sarah twenty years ago when she had been working on growing ancient date stones - dating back thousands of years - collected from Middle Eastern archaeological digs. Well now, with another ancient seed she found in a university collection from another archaeological dig, she’s “branched out” into a different part of the plant family tree, the one that includes myrrh and frankincense, and grown something else extraordinary…

Sarah - The seed that was discovered was not a date seed like the last time. It was another seed, but we didn't know what it was. No one could identify it. So it was popped in the earth by my colleague Elaine. And up came something that really was very surprising and we didn't know what it was. We sent pictures all over the world and one very clever botanist from Arizona Botanical Garden said, 'Hey, that's a  Commiphora'. And I said, 'what?' He said, 'you know,  Commiphora, the family of frankincense and myrrh.' I said, oh, that  Commiphora. So that's how it began.

Chris - Did the people who dug up the seed realise what it was? And why on earth would it end up in your hands and then going in a pot to grow?

Sarah - The seed was discovered around 40 years ago when archaeologists from the Hebrew University were exploring caves in the Judean Desert. And when you explore caves in the Judean Desert, you often find what they call botanical material, lots of seeds. And the archaeologists sort of take them, put them in little boxes and store them at the university and they don't really bother to identify them. So that seed was in a little box at Hebrew University and I asked the archaeologist if I could have a look at his boxes and he said, sure, take whatever you want. So I went through the boxes and when I was doing it, I found some very nice date seeds and I found this seed that was in beautiful condition. I didn't know how old it was, but it was in the cave. And I took that and I gave it to Elaine and she planted them. So the date story, we already know a few of those came up and this other unknown seed came up too.

Chris - How do you know how old it is? And indeed how old is it?

Sarah - As it was pushing out of the seed, the stalk if you like, it pushed off the seed cap. It was like a little cap on it, it's called the operculum. And she very cleverly took that little seed cap and put it in a little paper bag and gave it to me. And I sent it off to the radiocarbon testing lab in Switzerland in Zurich. Professor Markus Egli whose lab does that. And they came back with a date of about a thousand years ago.

Chris - Wow. And this seed has remained viable in the cave for all that time.

Sarah - Yeah, yeah. But you know, our date seed was much older. Our date seeds were 2000 years old and there's been a publication from Russia where they took seeds from permafrost in the Siberian region of Russia. And those seeds were 30,000 years old and they also came up. So our seeds and really by comparison are not that old. It's just that not many people have been trying to germinate them.

Chris - What does it look like? Is it a tree that's come up and how old? How old is it now? Because you did this a little while ago because obviously you are reporting on what you have now done.

Sarah - It's a tree, yeah. The family of frankincense, and they're called Burseraceae, And the  Commiphora, which is a kind of myrrh, is one of that family. But there's actually 200 types of  Commiphora, myrrh is just one. So what we did is we took leaves and we tested them to see what kind of  Commiphora it was. Was it a myrrh? Was it something else? And the  Commiphora are very different. Some of them are quite tall trees, some of them are more like shrubby bushes. They really differ. There's maybe 200 members in what we call that genus. We sent them to Professor Andrea Weeks at George Mason University in the US and she is probably the world's expert on  Commiphora. The name  Commiphora means giving resin. And she said, well I've got about 109 specimens of this  Commiphora from different types, including myrrh. But your one isn't like any of them.

Chris - Is that because she's got what we call extant species things you'd find in the world today. And yours is one that's gone extinct, or isn't grown anywhere anymore. So she just hasn't come across that. Is that one possible explanation?

Sarah - One possible explanation is that it's extinct and it doesn't grow anywhere. And the other possibility of course is that she hasn't got all of the  Commiphora in the world and maybe it's still hiding somewhere away and no one's ever collected it or tested it. Because I said there's about 200 species and she's got, you know, samples of maybe over half of them, but maybe it's the other half that she hasn't got. So we don't know. But until today, nowadays in Israel, there are no species like this that have existed not for hundreds and hundreds of years. We know that.

Chris - Would this have biblical relevance then? Given it's in that family and it's in that part of the world? Is there a potentially religious connection here?

Sarah - Well that's the interesting thing you see because in the Bible, in the book of Genesis, there's something in the book of Genesis which Jacob, you've heard of Jacob, he gives to his sons as a present to Pharaoh when the sons are going back to Egypt. And he says, give them a little what he called 'tsori', in Hebrew. And no one ever really knew what it was in Hebrew. It means to drip something that drips. And it was assumed that this was some very valuable resin material. And we know from other parts of the Bible, particularly from the books of the prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel, that this tsori was associated with the land of Gilead, which actually is on the other side of the Jordan and is now in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. So Gilead and tsori were connected. There was something, a tree there that produced a resin and it was very valuable. It was also connected with healing and it's disappeared and no one has really ever decided what it was. And we think that maybe what we grew is that tsori. And one of the reasons we think so is because some very clever chemists in France and in Australia tested the resin and found loads of compounds, which are very medicinal.