Before Genesis: The origin story of the apple

In the beginning, Adam blamed the whole thing on Eve: "The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat," Adam whined (Genesis 3). The woman, in turn, slimed the snake.

But what was it that the serpent reportedly beguiled Eve into eating, which she in turn persuaded her helpmeet to taste? What was the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, enabling them to distinguish good from evil?

"Well, there obviously never was a tree of knowledge so it's less that we don't know what it was and more that it wasn't," says Haaretz columnist and linguist Elon Gilad. "As for its identification with the apple, this comes from the European art world. Depictions of the fall in art required artists to draw something, and the apple is 'the fruit' in Europe."

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Apples are not mentioned in early Jewish sources but appear in Rosh Hashana tradition from about the year 1300, according to Vered Guttman. Some Jewish communities dip slices of the fruit in honey on the new year, though this is custom, not ritual, and whether the dvash mentioned in the bible was honey as we think of it, or for instance date syrup, is unclear. Meanwhile, apple has also become a common though not universal ingredient in charoset on Passover.

"The earliest to mention apples in charoset was Rashi," says Gilad. "Its wide adoption as the main ingredient is likely due to his influence. I don't think he came up with the recipe, though. It is probable that Jews in Northern Europe were using apples for some time before his time."

If so, possibly they were using fruit stored for the long term in barrels since Passover is a spring rite and apple harvest season is usually late summer to fall.

Apples also appeared in Greek and Norse mythology and in one story, yet again, the serpent makes an appearance. Golden apples grown by the Hesperides nymphs were protected by a giant snake. Tasked with stealing golden apples for King Eurystheus from the minor goddesses, Hercules reportedly vanquishes the unhappy creature, though another version says Hercules had Atlas do the dirty work. The story gets complicated but the point is, apples. Or, maybe apples.

In modern Hebrew apple is tapuach etz. The word tapuach appears in the bible as an area in the Book of Joshua and as a fruit in Psalms. Elon believes tapuach does refer to apple: other Semitic languages have the same word – in Arabic it's tufaħ, he points out. Apropos linguistics, in Old and Middle English and Germanic the apple/apfel referred to any fruit that wasn't a berry. Even the banana. It was called the "apple of paradise" as late as the 14th century.

The Sumerians also had a relationship with apples, if that's the fruit really depicted in the ornaments in Queen Pu-abi's tomb in Iraq from 4,500 years ago – the leaves resemble that of the apple tree, and the fruit has a certain aspect like wild apples. Also, dried apples were found in a Sumerian tomb in Ur and cuneiform tablets from over 4,100 years ago are believed to discuss apple cultivation.

Yet if it is the apple's origin story we seek, the Sumerian grave fruit may be misleading. For a fruit that attained such status across the ancient world, it hasn't been with us long, according to recent research. We began domesticating it only about 4,000 years ago at most, and possibly less.

Paradise in Kazakhstan

No question, the apple (Malus domestica) has gained economic and cultural significance and over 1,000 variants have emerged so far, according to a review from 2019 by Prof. Robert Spengler of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany. But where did its story begin?

In Kazakhstan, it turns out. So if the tree of knowledge was the apple then the Garden of Eden wasn't in Turkey but in central Asia. There are also isolated wild apple populations in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Also, a genetically isolated ecotype has also been noted in far western Xinjiang, Spengler says.

"Geneticists have shown that there are at least four different wild apples that were hybridized to result in the modern apple," he says. These are the European wild apple, the Caucuses but chiefly, central to both, the Central Asian wild apple. "The main genetic source is from a small endangered population of wild apples in the Tien Shan Mountains of southeastern Kazakhstan," he sums up.

Sadly for the Central Asian wild apple, its forests suffered encroachment by the development of the city of Almaty, but there are conservation efforts, the professor adds.

The fourth ancestor was Malus baccata which has a small fruit about the size of a marble – i.e., a crabapple.

Tomato and potato are a far cry from their origins. What is wild apple like? "I ate some last summer – they taste a lot like an apple, maybe a bit more sour," Spengler answers. "The popular author Michael Pollan described them as coming in many different shapes, colors, and tastes, but what I have seen are mostly reddish, maybe with some variation in hues and they range in size, but mostly a bit larger than a golf ball."

When the mammoth was no more

Botanically, the apple is a member of the rose family, Rosaceae, as are the pear and peach, the apricot and plum, the cherry and quince and almond. Yes, and the rose. And when the world was young and we didn't exist, Rosaceae featuring large fruit and large seeds depended on megafauna for broader distribution.

That is because apples really don't fall far from the tree, which can result in horrible rotting piles of sugary fruit around the trunk, competition between the parent tree and the potential kiddie trees, and more. Therefore, successful fleshy sweet fruit species tend to have adapted to endozoochory: dispersal by animal, Spengler says. It is a case of megafaunal mutualism, he says.

"Basically, a large fruit that is too big to be swallowed by a bird must have evolved to be consumed by a large animal," he tells Haaretz. "You can still see megafaunal seed-dispersal-based mutualism in action in Africa with elephants. The plant evolved to put a lot its energy into producing sugar in the fleshy part of that fruit, with the goal of attracting a large animal."

Unfortunately for the evolutionary strategy of the megafruiting plants, in the last 1.5 million years, the body mass of animals shrank by 98 percent, according to separate research. By the end of the Pleistocene, most large animals from the giant sloth to the mammoth were extinct. Megafruiting species today consequently tend to have small ranges and to be more inbred, Spengler points out – if they survived at all.

Apropos, humans are megafaunal seed dispersers too: We pick fruit from trees, eat it and discard the seed somewhere else. If we liked the megafruit, it had a better chance.

"When humans came across these species, they readily spread them around functioning just like the megafauna did," Spengler sums up.

Apples specifically may have survived the megafaunal holocaust because they have relatively small seeds: smaller animals such as birds, and also bears can disperse their seeds too.

Asked about megafaunal extinction and fruit, Spengler stresses that it can take thousands of years for a perennial plant to go extinct after their dispersers have died off. But it was a close call. The wild apple clings on in a few river valleys of southeastern Kazakhstan, as we said; but in an era of animals other than we, its distribution was likely wider. "This population is simply the last refugia for this important tree," he says.

"There are many other examples of this process in the wild, such as the Osage orange in the American southwest, which was confined to one county in Arkansas before Europeans came in with horses," he adds.

Today the apple grows in temperate zones around the world, demonstrating that we humans are really good at seed dispersal. But we began with the apple later than one might think.

Undomesticated and unrepentant

Grains and legumes were domesticated about 10,000 years ago (this is in the Near East; the Neolithic elsewhere was at different times). We also captured and domesticated the cow and sheep, the goat and pig about that time. But we only started cultivating apple trees only about 4,000 to 3,000 years ago, research has concluded.

Unlike in cereals, domestication of fruit trees appears to have been rapid and driven by hybridization (in the case of apples, of those four species, as mentioned above), Spengler says.

In fact there is no consensus that cereal domestication was protracted and gradual; Prof. Avi Gopher of Tel Aviv University for one believes it could plausibly have happened very fast.

Spengler however explains that the thinking recently is it wasn't fast, it was gradual and in any case, the mechanisms driving domestication of a grass and a tree are very different.

"Apples, like most long-generation perennials (trees), break all the rules of domestication, because the rules were created for annual crops. While the first traits of domestication in most annual crops do appear to have slowly evolved in the early cultivated populations over millennia, the process for domestication for the apple would have looked very different," he says. "By moving the apples around, ancient peoples would have inadvertently led to their hybridization, simply by bringing a Central Asian apple into the area where the wild European apple grew – the bees would have done the rest."

Crucially, at some point somebody noticed that one tree was producing larger, sweeter fruits than another; one chooses the seeds from that tree, which is well and good and its the same with wheat. The difference is that farmers learned that a branch could be cut off of that large-fruiting tree and grafted onto another tree, cloning the tree that they liked.

"This could be thought of as rapid domestication, although, as the trait has not evolved into the tree, it could also be argued that the apple is not even domesticated at all. In short, we need all new criteria to discuss domestication in tree crops," Spengler wraps up.

So what have we? A fruit whose wild ancestor clings on only in some valleys of Kazakhstan, following the extinction of the megafaunal distributors, and the less said about the state of bees, the better. But for the apple and some other Rosaceae, we replaced the missing megafauna and discovered grafting too. Technically grafting isn't evolutionary change and the definition of domestication is genetic change to the plant or animal. And if you take a seed from your beloved apple tree and plant it, you may get any variety of characteristics, Spengler sums up.

As for the Sumerians, how could their graves have dried apples 4,500 years ago if they weren't "domesticated" yet?

"The apples were cut in half, dried, and strung together; they preserved due to being buried in a royal tomb. As there has been so much archaeobotanical work in this part of the world, and no other early apples or their seeds have been recovered, it seems unlikely that they were cultivating them," Spengler says. "That said, they were able to get their hands on some apples, but it is unclear whether these were trade items or is there were some remnant wild apple populations in that part of the world in the past too. There is still much that we do not know."

So, possibly neither the cat nor the apple can be considered to have even been domesticated and now we know the domestication story of the apple.