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10 HASHALOM August
2016
August 2016
HASHALOM
11
A new study has allowed scientists to peer thousands of years back
in time via a grain of barley found in the Judean Desert.
Barley seeds, dated to 6,000 years ago, have become the oldest
plant genome to be sequenced, an international team of researchers
announced in a journal article published Monday. Analysis of the
6,000-year-old cereals supports the hypothesis that the key crop
was domesticated thousands of years ago in the Jordan Valley.
A team of scientists from Israel, Germany, the United Kingdom
and the US employed a wide array of disciplines - archaeology,
archaeobotany and genetics - to study the material found in the
Yoram Cave. The findings were released in the academic journal
Nature Genetics.
The Chalcolithic kernels were discovered in a cavern overlooking
the Dead Sea on the southern end of Masada, a mountaintop better
known for Jewish rebels’ last stand against the Roman Empire in the
first century CE.
The arid climate and precipitous cliff left the grains preserved for
millennia. Ehud Weiss of Bar-Ilan University, one of the heads of the
study, told The Times of Israel that whereas most ancient kernels are
found charred and useless for DNA study, those excavated from the
cave on Masada by a Hebrew University team “looked almost alive,
almost fresh.”
Their immaculate preservation allowed scientists to “read the DNA
from these seeds” and determine that they were domesticated
locally, he said.
Weiss said that the barley found at Masada could only have been grown
at least 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the remote mesa. Hebrew
University archaeologist Uri Davidovitch posited that the people
who brought it to the cave may have fled some unknown catastrophe
and sought refuge in the desert, just like the mountaintop’s Jewish
inhabitants thousands of years later.
Radiocarbon dating determined the seeds were 6,000 years old, grown
several millennia after humans residing in the Fertile Crescent first
domesticated grains such as barley and wheat around 10,000 years ago.
Until now, corn was the only ancient grain whose genetic fingerprint was fully
mapped out. Barley’s genome was only studied through modern samples.
The seeds found in at Masada are “much closer to the time and place
of domestication,” Weiss said. They are a “time capsule” that gives
scientists a shortcut around 6,000 years of genetic mutation and offers
insight into what the ancients ate.
Sequencing prehistoric barley is “just the beginning of a new and exciting
line of research,” Verena Schuenemann of Tubingen University, one of
the heads of the study, said.
Examination of the barley grains’ genome found they are significantly
different from wild varieties, but similar to modern cultivars still grown
in the region. The finding bolsters the hypothesis that barley was
domesticated in the Jordan Valley, researchers said.
Last year a study by researchers from Tel Aviv University, Harvard
University and Bar Ilan found cultivated plants in the Galilee dating back
23,000 years, pushing back the origins of domesticated crops at least
11,000 years.
A study published in 2015 said genetic analysis of barley varieties pointed
to domestication of the grain occurring at several points across the
Mideast in prehistory.
“DNA-analysis of archaeological remains of prehistoric plants will provide
us with novel insights into the origin, domestication and spread of crop
plants,” Schuenemann said in a statement.
6 Millennia old but ‘almost fresh,’
Masada seeds unravel barley’s origins
Grains found in Judean Desert, the oldest plant DNA ever sequenced, point to cereal’s
domestication in JordanValley, scientists say
JEWISH WORLD
JEWISH WORLD
By Ilan Ben Zion – Times of Israel
By Fred Gordon - Columbus State University
Supporters of Greece’s fascist Golden Dawn party.
An aerial view of Masada (photo credit: Shmuel Bar-Am)
The world lost a great humanitarian
Elie Wiesel last weekend. Wiesel was a
Holocaust survivor, but his main contribution
was more than just surviving a genocide,
one that took his parents and a sibling. His
story is remarkable in that he saw suffering,
lived it, and dedicated his life to speaking out
against intolerance, repression and racism.
W
iesel was born to a Hungarian Jewish family in 1928, though his
actual birthplace was the Carpathian Mountains in Romania. In
1944, he and his family were placed in a ghetto in Sighet, Romania,
which straddles the Polish, Hungarian and Romanian borders. Hungary
was one of the last major countries to deport Jews to the death
camps. Yet in May 1944, and under much pressure from German
authorities, the Hungarian government began to transport its Jewish
community, which included Elie Wiesel and his family, to Auschwitz.
Ninety percent of the deportees were killed immediately, including
Wiesel’s mother and younger sister. Wiesel and his father were
eventually transported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. His
father was ruthlessly beaten and died weeks before its liberation. Elie
Wiesel was 17 years old when he was liberated.
It’s not so much where one comes from, but what one does next.
This was the gift of Elie Wiesel.
He learned French in the Sorbonne. He later became an international
correspondent for an Israeli newspaper in France. Initially, Wiesel did
not want to write about his experiences during the war. However, a
French Nobel Prize Laureate encouraged him share his experiences,
and 1955 he wrote “Le Nuit,” which was translated into “Night” in
1960. This book detailed his experiences in the concentration camps,
including his inability to help his father as he was beaten mercilessly. It
is a widely read book and often assigned in college classes.
Flash forward… Wiesel wrote more than 40 books, mostly detailing
his personal experiences during the Holocaust. He was a Nobel
Laureate and a professor of humanities at Boston University, and
helped establish the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington.
He was also a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman
University and a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal.
However, his salience extends well beyond his literary and numerous
accomplishments. He dedicated much of his career to political
activism and championed for the oppressed globally. Whether it
was South Africa, the Sudan or Nicaragua, Wiesel voiced support
for the defenseless. In 2009, regarding the Tamils in Sri Lanka, he
stated: “Wherever minorities are being persecuted we must raise our
voices to protest ... the Tamil people are being disenfranchised and
victimized by the Sri Lankan authorities. This injustice must stop. The
Tamil people must be allowed to live in peace and flourish in their
homeland.” He also recognized the 1915 Armenian genocide in which
1.5 million Armenians were killed under Turkish rule.
Perhaps most poignantly, in 2012 he returned the Green Cross award
presented to him by the Hungarian government in 2004 because
top Hungarian officials attended a ceremony for a Nazi sympathizer.
Despite a life -- or better yet, a second one -- replete with
tremendous achievements, he held onto his code of ethics.
Yet Wiesel was like a Lazarus, a term ascribed to him by his French
Laureate friend, in that he rose up from the ashes and not only
survived an unfathomable beginning, but also made an important,
indelible contribution that one must never be silent to oppression.
As he stated in his Nobel Prize speech, “I swore never to be
silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and
humiliation.” As our nation celebrates another birthday, we should be
reminded how valuable and fragile freedom is.”
Never be silent:
Memorial tribute to life of Elie Wiesel