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, we 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. We compared them with a large modern reference collection and Egyptian archaeological seeds from a previous study. This study highlights the potential of seed morphometric analyses in the study of crop domestication and diffusion. We provide here 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. We also provide the elliptic fourier coefficients obtained from the seed outlines of the modern collection, the libyan archaeological seeds and the egyptian archaeological seeds.