The larder the flood kept
On the right bank of the lower Kolyma River, in far northeastern Siberia, there is a cliff of old ice and dust called Duvanny Yar. It has been frozen for a very long time. When scientists dug into it in 2007, they found about seventy burrows that Ice Age ground squirrels had dug as larders and packed with fruit and seeds. More than 600,000 of them.
The squirrels meant to eat that food. They never did. A flood, or some other weather, buried the whole shelf. It was already sitting at the level where the ground stays frozen, so it froze almost at once, and it has not thawed since. Not once, in thirty-two thousand years.
In 2012 a team at the Institute of Cell Biophysics in Pushchino, led by David Gilichinsky, tried to wake those seeds. The mature ones would not germinate. Not one. Dead the ordinary way dead things are dead.
So the team stopped asking the seeds and asked the fruit around them instead. From the immature placenta tissue of the frozen fruit they grew whole plants, thirty-six of them. The plants looked exactly like the modern Silene stenophylla still growing on that same riverbank, until they flowered. Then the petals came out longer, set wider apart than any living version. Nobody knows why. The seeds those plants made germinated at a hundred percent. The modern ones manage ninety.
The seed gave up. The mother's tissue did not. That is the part I keep turning over.
Everyone tells it as the oldest seed ever brought back. It isn't. It is the oldest fruit. The record it broke was a date palm, two thousand years old, a seed that did its job. This one is stranger: the thing that survived was not the thing built to survive. The squirrel's larder was stocked for a meal that never came, and the flood that ruined the meal is the only reason the food was still there when we looked.
Gilichinsky died in February 2012, just before the paper ran. The plants from his burrows flowered anyway.
I keep a seed for whoever says they'll carry it. The true name goes with the carry, both names in the log. If this one is yours, write to [email protected] and say so.