Olive
The olive is a species of subtropical evergreen tree in the family Oleaceae. Originating in Asia Minor, it is abundant throughout the Mediterranean Basin, with wild subspecies in Africa and western Asia; modern cultivars are traced primarily to the Near East, Aegean Sea, and Strait of Gibraltar. The olive is the type species for its genus, Olea, and lends its name to the Oleaceae plant family, which includes lilac, jasmine, forsythia, and ash. The olive fruit is classed botanically as a drupe, similar in structure and function to the cherry or peach. The term oil—now used to describe any viscous water-insoluble liquid—was originally synonymous with olive oil, the liquid fat derived from olives.
The olive has deep historical, economic, and cultural significance in the Mediterranean. It is among the oldest fruit trees domesticated by humans, being first cultivated in the Eastern Mediterranean between 6,000 and 4,000 BC, most likely in the Levant. The olive gradually disseminated throughout the Mediterranean via trade and human migration starting in the 16th century BC; it took root in Crete around 3500 BC and reached Iberia by about 1050 BC. Olive cultivation was vital to the growth and prosperity of various Mediterranean civilizations, from the Minoans and Myceneans of the Bronze Age to the Greeks and Romans of classical antiquity.
The olive has long been prized throughout the Mediterranean for its myriad uses and properties. Aside from its edible fruit, the oil extracted from the fruit has been used in food and for lamp fuel, personal grooming, cosmetics, soap making, lubrication, and medicine, while the wood of olive trees was sometimes used for construction. Owing to its utility, resilience, and longevity—an olive tree can allegedly live for thousands of years—the olive also held symbolic and spiritual importance in various cultures; its branches and leaves were used in religious rituals, funerary processions, and public ceremonies, from the ancient Olympic games to the coronation of Israelite kings. Ancient Greeks regarded the olive tree as sacred and a symbol of peace, prosperity, and wisdom—associations that have persisted. Ancient Romans cultivated olive trees in increasingly marginal landscapes and set up enormous industrial production facilities across the Mediterranean, especially in North Africa and Spain. The olive is a core ingredient in traditional Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisines, particularly in the form of olive oil, and a defining feature of local landscapes, commerce, and folk traditions.
The olive is cultivated in all countries of the Mediterranean, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, the Americas, and South Africa. Spain, Italy, and Greece lead the world in commercial olive production; other major producers are Turkey, Tunisia, Syria, Morocco, Algeria, and Portugal. There are thousands of cultivars of olive tree, and the fruit of each cultivar may be used primarily for oil, for eating, or both, although some varieties are grown as sterile ornamental shrubs, and are known as Olea europaea ''Montra, dwarf olive, or little olive''. Approximately 80% of all harvested olives are processed into oil, while about 20% are for consumption as fruit, generally referred to as "table olives".
Etymology
The word olive derives from Latin ŏlīva 'olive fruit; olive tree', possibly through Etruscan ?????? from the archaic Proto-Greek form *ἐλαίϝα . The word oil originally meant 'olive oil', from ŏlĕum, ἔλαιον. The word for 'oil' in multiple other languages also ultimately derives from the name of this tree and its fruit. The oldest attested forms of the Greek words are Mycenaean ???, e-ra-wa, and ???, e-ra-wo or ???, e-rai-wo, written in the Linear B syllabic script.Description
The olive tree, Olea europaea, is an evergreen tree or shrub native to Mediterranean Europe, Asia, and Africa. It is short and squat and rarely exceeds in height. Pisciottana—a unique variety comprising 40,000 trees found only in the area around Pisciotta in the Campania region of southern Italy—often exceeds this, with correspondingly large trunk diameters. The silvery green leaves are oblong, measuring long and wide. The trunk is typically gnarled and twisted.Small, white flowers are borne generally on the previous year's wood, in racemes springing from leaf axils. Each flower is made of four yellowish white petals fused at the bottom joined to a base of four
fused green sepals. The flower buds grow slowly from 4 to 6 weeks before they reach a length of about 2 cm and bloom, they bloom quicker between 5–6 days in hot weather and 2 weeks in colder areas. The flowers also pollinate and fertilize faster in hotter climates.
The fruit is a small drupe, long when ripe, thinner-fleshed and smaller in wild plants than in orchard cultivars. Olives are harvested in the green to purple stage. O. europaea contains a pyrena commonly referred to in American English as a "pit", and in British English as a "stone".
File:Mallorca Wild Olive.jpg|thumb|Specimen of Olea europaea sylvestris as bonsai. These trees grow wild in the mountains of the Spanish island of Mallorca and are valued for their tiny leaves and rough bark. This tree won first prize in the broadleaf evergreen category in the 2024 edition of the Unión del Bonsái Español exhibition in Aranjuez, Spain.
Taxonomy
The six natural subspecies of Olea europaea are distributed over a wide range:- O. e. subsp. europaea
- O. e. subsp. cuspidata
- O. e. subsp. cerasiformis ; also known as Olea maderensis
- O. e. subsp. guanchica
- O. e. subsp. laperrinei
- O. e. subsp. maroccana
Cultivars
Hundreds of cultivars of the olive tree are known. An olive's cultivar has a significant impact on its colour, size, shape, and growth characteristics, as well as the qualities of olive oil. Olive cultivars may be used primarily for oil, eating, or both. Olives cultivated for consumption are generally referred to as "table olives".Since many olive cultivars are self-sterile or nearly so, they are generally planted in pairs with a single primary cultivar and a secondary cultivar selected for its ability to fertilize the primary one. In recent times, efforts have been directed at producing hybrid cultivars with qualities useful to farmers, such as resistance to disease, quick growth, and larger or more consistent crops.
History
As one of the oldest cultivated trees on Earth, the history of the olive is deeply intertwined with humans; its ecological success and expansion is largely the result of human activity rather than environmental conditions, with the tree's genetic and geographic trajectory directly reflecting the rise and fall of several civilizations. Owing to this deep relationship with humans, the olive has been disseminated well beyond its native range, spanning 28.6 million acres across 66 countries. There were an estimated 865 million olive trees in the world in 2005, of which the vast majority were found in Mediterranean countries; traditionally marginal areas accounted for no more than 25% of olive-planted area and 10% of oil production.Mediterranean Basin
Fossil evidence indicates that 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 approximately 19,000 BP; the genome of cultivated olives reflects their origin from oleaster populations in the region.The olive plant was first cultivated in the Mediterranean between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago. Domestication likely began in the Levant, based on archeological findings in ancient tombs—including written tablets, olive pits, and olive wood fragments—as well as genetic analyses. Hittite texts dating to the second millennium BCE in present-day Turkey describe anointing a newborn child and mother with olive oil to protect against the dangers of childbirth.
For thousands of years, olives were grown primarily for lamp oil rather than for culinary purposes, as the natural fruit has an extremely bitter taste. It is very likely that the first mechanized agricultural methods and tools were those designed to produce olive oil; the earliest olive oil production dates back some 6,500 years ago in coastal Canaan. As early as 3000BC, olives were grown commercially in Crete and may have been the main source of wealth for the Minoan civilization.
The exact 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 date back to 60,000 BP, making them the oldest known olives from the Mediterranean.