Plant Portraits 10. The Fruit of Life

  (Note images in this series were generated with the assistance of modern AI tools. No actual human individuals are portrayed here. See the first installment of the series for further explanation)

In an earlier post, I explained why humanity might never have come into being without the fig. Its tropical relatives have been a vital source of food for primates since they first entered the rain forest canopy, and the species that evolved in the drier regions of the Middle East have sustained human populations for millennia. 

In the rainforests throughout the tropics, figs are a reliable food source for monkeys and other arboreal animals because of their habit of nearly continuous fruit production. Without the figs, primates may have diversified much more slowly, or not at all, and failed to give rise to our ground-dwelling ancestors. In this picture, the massive fruit set of Ficus sur is a feast for these guenon monkeys in Africa.

When Neanderthals entered Europe through the Middle East, the common species that we grow today, Ficus carica, was likely vital for their survival as well. This scene depicts an imagined later event of about 60,000 years ago, after modern humans had arrived from Africa. A Neanderthal man has two wives, one of them is a modern human, illustrating the fact, documented by genetic analysis, that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred. 

 

Some scholars believe that the forbidden fruit referred to in ancient stories of the Garden of Eden was more likely the fig, rather than the apple as often depicted in modern times. The particular type of fruit is not specified in the stories, but apples did not occur in the Middle East at the time.

The date palm, Phoenix dactylifera, though unrelated to the fig, also originated in the Middle East and has been a vital source of food in the region for millennia. Here an early Mesopotamian family harvests dates from a cultivated grove. Note the lone male tree in blossom on the left. Date palms are dioecious, which means individual trees bear either male flowers or female flowers, not both. Early cultivators realized that they needed only one male tree to fertilized dozens of female trees.