The English word oil once meant only one thing: olive oil
Oil comes from the Latin oleum, olive oil, and in many languages the word for oil traces back to this single tree. People on Morocco's Atlantic coast were using olives around 100,000 years ago, and the tree was among the first fruit crops ever domesticated.
The cultivated olive is a subspecies of an evergreen subtropical tree in the family that bears its name, Oleaceae. It typically grows to about 10 metres, with grey bark, a gnarled, twisting trunk and narrow leaves that are grey-green on top and whitish underneath. Small white flowers appear on the previous year's growth; buds take 4 to 6 weeks to open, and blooming lasts under a week in hot weather but around two weeks in cooler places. The fruit is a drupe, related in structure to a cherry or peach, 1 to 2.5 centimetres long when ripe.
Its history runs deep. Fossils suggest the tree arose 20 to 40 million years ago in the Oligocene, in what is now Italy and the eastern Mediterranean. It was first cultivated in the eastern Mediterranean between about 6,000 and 4,000 BC and spread by trade and migration, underpinning the prosperity of several civilisations. The oldest Greek forms of the word appear in Mycenaean Linear B script. Its range today reflects people more than climate: the olive covers some 28.6 million acres in 66 countries.
Later journeys carried it much further. Spanish colonists brought it to the Americas in the 18th century, and it now grows in Argentina, Chile, Peru and Australia. Japan's first olive trees were planted in 1908 on Shodo, an island in the Seto Inland Sea that still produces over 95 percent of the country's olives. Spain, Italy and Greece lead commercial production, and about 80 percent of the harvest becomes oil, the rest cured and fermented as table olives.
The tree prefers limestone slopes and coastal climates, and Pliny the Elder noted that rich soil makes it sickly and its oil poor. Deep roots let it shrug off drought, though frost below minus 10 degrees Celsius can harm even old trees. With proper pruning it can bear fruit for centuries. Its branch remains a symbol of peace, and its oil once fuelled lamps.
Source: Olive
