Olive
Mediterranean Basin

Fossil evidence indicates the olive tree had its origins 20 – 40 million years ago in the Oligocene, in what now corresponds to Italy and the eastern Mediterranean Basin. Around 100,000 years ago, olives were used by humans in Africa, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, for fuel and most probably for consumption. Wild olive trees, or oleasters, have been collected in the Eastern Mediterranean since ~19,000 BP. The genome of cultivated olives reflects their origin from oleaster populations in the Eastern Mediterranean. The olive plant was first cultivated some 7,000 years ago in Mediterranean regions.

For thousands of years olives were grown primarily for lamp oil, with little regard for culinary flavor. Its origin can be traced to the Levant based on written tablets, olive pits, and wood fragments found in ancient tombs. As far back as 3000 BC, olives were grown commercially in Crete and may have been the source of the wealth of the Minoan civilization.

The ancestry of the cultivated olive is unknown. Fossil olea pollen has been found in Macedonia and other places around the Mediterranean, indicating that this genus is an original element of the Mediterranean flora. Fossilized leaves of olea were found in the palaeosols of the volcanic Greek island of Santorini and dated to about 37,000 BP. Imprints of larvae of olive whitefly Aleurobus olivinus were found on the leaves. The same insect is commonly found today on olive leaves, showing that the plant-animal co-evolutionary relations have not changed since that time. Other leaves found on the same island are dated back to 60,000 BP, making them the oldest known olives from the Mediterranean.
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