Origins and evolution of oasis agriculture in the Sahara: morphometric measurements of archaeological and modern date palm seeds

The development of oasis agriculture is a turning point for humans in North Africa and West Asia. The date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.), is one of the most critical species in these agroecosystems. It was domesticated in the Gulf region over 6,000 years ago and later spread to other regions. In the Sahara, the origins of the germplasm and the diffusion history in terms of dating and routes remain largely unknown.

To explore these questions, the authors employed traditional and geometric morphometric methods to analyze 312 well-preserved Phoenix seeds from three Libyan archaeological sites, dating from the first millennium BCE to the modern period. The authors compared them with a large modern reference collection and Egyptian archaeological seeds from a previous study.

This study highlights that date palm was already cultivated in the Central Sahara during the 1st mill. BCE, probably through an introduction from Egypt. Moreover, the morphometric analysis shows the intensification of date palm cultivation over time, coinciding with the growing prevalence of human selection and vegetative propagation. The study highlights the potential of seed morphometric analyses in uncovering the domestication and diffusion history of crops.

This dataset provides the traditional and geometric morphometric measurements that support the findings of this study. Traditional measurements such as width, length, thickness and area are available for Libyan seeds and the modern reference collection. It also provides the elliptic Fourier coefficients obtained from the seed outlines of the modern collection, the libyan archaeological seeds and the egyptian archaeological seeds.