ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Sometimes, the journey a seed makes can seem, well, nearly miraculous. That is the case of one that was found on an archaeological dig in a cave in the Judean desert.
SARAH SALLON: The seed was discovered, along with a few other seeds in a cave that was being excavated by archaeologists from the Hebrew University in the 1980s.
SCHMITZ: That's Dr. Sarah Sallon in Jerusalem. Decades after it was discovered, the seed eventually fell into her hands. It was a mystery what plant produced it, though. She did what humans have done with seeds for millennia. She planted it.
SALLON: I was convinced that certain seeds, if you planted them, no matter how old they were, could germinate.
SCHMITZ: And she was right. It grew. But as the seed became a sapling and grew taller, Dr. Sallon still was no closer to understanding what she had on her hands.
SALLON: I had no idea what it was. I couldn't identify it. And so I showed it to a few friends of mine who were botanists, and they said, well, we don't know what that is, either. It's odd. We haven't seen that before.
SCHMITZ: The group of scientists were at a loss as to what was growing in their greenhouse.
SALLON: It's like a detective story. The questions I asked were, what was it? What was this seed that we'd grown? No. 1 - could we identify it? No. 2 - what was it doing there? And No. 3 - what was its significance? So those were the questions that I tried to set out to answer in the research.
SCHMITZ: While they tried to figure out what plant they were growing, the researchers also wanted to know if they could date the seed. They were able to collect a small sample of the seed to try and figure out how old it was.
SALLON: In order to know how old the seed is, you have to do radiocarbon analysis. It's carbon-14. And I sent it to Switzerland for radiocarbon analysis. And then it came back as a thousand years old, OK? - because we didn't know how old it was before then.
SCHMITZ: The tree, nicknamed Sheba, is now 14 years old, standing 8 feet tall, but the tree is still a bit of a mystery.
SALLON: It started to develop little leaves, and I showed pictures of it to botanists in various parts of the world, and one of them got back to me and said, oh, you've grown a Commiphora. I said, Commiphora? And he said, yes, the family of myrrh and frankincense, the famous incense family.
SCHMITZ: And yes, that would be frankincense and myrrh, plant resins mentioned in the Bible. But with over 200 known species in the plant's genus, experts still cannot identify its specific species. Sheba may indeed represent an extinct species. We may never know. As the tree grows taller, scientists hope to unlock the mystery of what species sprung from that ancient seed before the next thousand years or so. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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