Eating an 11,000 Year Old Fruit

Mmm....Dusty...

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[vlogbrothers]

To quote kendrick lamar: wap waps wasps wap wapuhs. crashcoursecoin.com -John

[ItsARogue]

Measuring Vlogbrothers eras like Dr Who, but based on Hank's hairstyles

[mmmlinux]

other fruit: i figured out how to propagate my seeds using animals
seedless fig: I FIGURED HOW TO LIVE FOR EVER BY USING HUMANS

[graemebloodworth]

I'm so mad that Hank already styles his curly hair better than me who has had curly hair my whole life.

[neonjoe]

So cool. It's not 11, 000 years old, but my mom has a grape vine taken from a cutting from a vine at my grandpa's house, which he got from a vine that his grandfather brought with him on whatever ship he was in when he immigrated to the US.

[MDNphil]

I love figs. In Cantonese they are called "mo fa gou" which roughly translates into "no flower fruit." I bought this coin as a way to remember my grandparents as well. My grandfather grew a massive fig tree in his yard but I only started eating them around high school because the fruits looked they were packed with alien worms or something. This is a great reminder of two sources of wisdom that I respect, cherish and love. DFTBA

[DramaticFlora]

As someone growing figs about as far from the mediterenean as you can get i appreciate that first special fig

[dcgamer]

the fig tree story is such a work of art I think I'm gonna buy a coin just for that alone.

[GeoffreyCavalier]

Hank say the plural for of wasp can summon cats.

[MasterOB-bywn]

Slowly realising this was gonna be about crash course was an exhilarating experience. Don’t have the money to donate at this point in time so I am so great full to everyone who can and does!

[wgrandbois]

This is also why every Honeycrisp apple, Haas avocado and Cavendish banana you've ever eaten is kinda from the same tree.

[CheeseDud]

My wife and I planted a seedless fig cutting at our wedding, so this obviously makes it so much cooler

[hebedite]

I learned this entirely by accident one day as a kid with my brother lol. We were just walking around with sticks and thought it was funny to put these two literal sticks in the dirt, and ended up accidentally discovering how fig trees work lmao. I like to think the discovery of fig propagation was a similar to my story, just two kids playing with sticks and accidentally growing trees.

[samwill]

Human being, discovering a source of sugars: Woah, GUYS!

[ilanag]

It's cool that an organism which would have been the unsuccessful oddball of it's tree friend group became maybe the most successful fig tree ever??? What a metaphor for divergence being a strength rather than a flaw.

[jenniferburns]

Hank's excitement in telling us about figs is a perfect example of why Crash Course is great. Learning from people who take joy in sharing knowledge motivates the students.

[sarahrabinowitz]

Im gunna share this story with my biology students!! We’re finishing up our evolution unit today :)

[customs]

"...from Earth's first farmers."
Leafcutter ants: Am I a joke to you?!

[StuffandThings_]

as an avid gardener and huge plant nerd I have a few things to add to this. One, you don't have to root cuttings to clone plants. Yes, figs are really easy to do this with (I'd know, I've rooted a few myself), but in many situations grafting is preferable. Grafting itself is also pretty wild, you're literally fusing two different plants together, sometimes from different species or in exceptional cases even different _genuses, _ simply by carefully cutting them, sticking them together, and the plant does the rest of the work by basically making the plant form of stem cells and fusing the cambiums of both plants together.

As for figs, the ones that don't need pollination (parthenocarpic figs), also known as "common type" figs, aren't exactly all clones of the original tree. IIRC they all have some parentage from those original parthenocarpic trees, and are often cloned simply for keeping around the particular desired variety, but they can be produced through sexual reproduction (seeds) and many have quite long lineages. You'll still get seeds from parthenocarpic varieties but if not pollinated they will be empty and nonviable. Most fig growers actually prefer pollinated, seed filled figs since when pollinated even the parthenocarpic varieties produce higher quality fruit and the seeds add a nice nuttiness. There's also a couple that are truly seedless, but again plenty of these are more modern varieties. Parthenocary and seedlessness are traits that seem to crop up all the time, its not quite such an absurdly rare one off, and have occurred in all sorts of cultivated plants. Perhaps there's some particularly ancient truly seedless fig cultivar from the middle east that you're talking about here, but I haven't heard of any that have been cloned for quite that long, and considering the fig community they would probably go nuts for such a thing, hype it up like crazy, and sell cuttings for eye popping prices if such a thing truly was found and confirmed. As for the figs you ate, they're probably the cultivar "calimyrna, " a smyrna type fig which requires pollination to set fruit and ironically is a cultivar far older than a lot of the fancy modern parthenocarpic ones. So you're still eating figs from a quite old, perhaps even ancient, cloned tree.

[thatsawsembabe]

When my grandmother went to college, she got a pothos plant. She propagated and kept a version of that pothos her whole life. When she died, my dad took over the plant. When I went to college, he gave me a propagation of the same pothos. In essence, I still have the same pothos of the plant my grandmother had when she went to college! So cool!