Thread by @KieranSuckling

Olives ripened late this year in Tucson, I'm just getting them in brine now.

The path of olives trees (Olea europaea) to Tucson is long and tangled. They evolved in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean Basin during the Oligocene, 20 to 40 million years ago.

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We don't know when humans learned to cure olives, and Lawrence Durrell was likely wrong to call them "a taste older than meat, older than wine...as old as cold water," but we do know Athena beat Poseidon in a contest to give humans the greatest gift by offering them an olive tree

Her reward was to become the deity and namesake of Athens. The contest is depicted in the west pediment sculptures of the Parthenon. An olive tree remains to this day in the Acropolis at the site of the contest.

Poseidon's losing gift was a salt water well, usually thought to symbolize marine trading power. But taken literally, it is the recipe for making olives edible: they are inedible unless cured in salt water for 6 weeks. This likely happened 1st by accidental brining in tide pools.

Olives were eaten by people 19,000 years ago, and were domesticated about 7,000 years ago (in Israel, Palestine and Jordan).

It seems mystically long, but the olive whitefly (Aleurolobus olivinus) appears on 37,000 year old olive fossils, just as it does today on live leaves.

The whitefly/olive relationship is likely tens of thousands of years older. Remarkably, neither species has changed in at least 37,000 years. They are pretty comfortable with each other, the whitefly hitching along as late-on-the-scene two-leggeds moved olives around the world.

Spanish invaders brought olives and genocide to the New World in the 16th century. The first seedlings were planted in Lima, Peru by Antonio de Rivera in 1560. Spanish missionaries brought the whitefly host north to California in the 18th century.

They leapt from Santa Barbara to Tucson in 1895 in the person of Robert H. Forbes, newly hired U of A chemistry/agriculture prof who planted them on campus and around Olive Hill, a development he built.

There was no hill. There is no longer a development. The olive trees remain.

The county banned olive planting in 1991 because of allergens. Thus there are no young trees here. But if the old ones are cared for, Tucson will delight urban food foragers for another 2,000 years

This guy on Crete is ~3,000 years old. I pick at Himmel Park & the police station

This tree is 2-4 thousand years old. Know one knows for sure because it's not possible to core it for tree rings as all the heartwood died long ago. That's another amazing aspect of olives, they can revive from near total above ground death and don't even need hartwood to live.