Origins and evolution of oasis agriculture in the Sahara: morphometric measurements of archaeological and modern date palm seeds

The date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.), is one of the most critical species in these agroecosystems. It was domesticated in the Gulf region over 6,000 years ago and later spread to other regions.

In the Sahara, the origins of the germplasm and the diffusion history in terms of dating and routes remain largely unknown. To explore these questions, we employed traditional and geometric morphometric methods to analyze 312 well-preserved Phoenix seeds from three Libyan archaeological sites, dating from the first millennium BCE to the modern period. We compared them with a large modern reference collection and Egyptian archaeological seeds from a previous study.