Genome analysis reveals that North African date palms are a hybrid between cultivated date palms from the Middle East and a different, wild species of palm that grows on the island of Crete and in small areas of Southern Turkey. These findings, the result of research at NYU Abu Dhabi's Center for Genomics and Systems Biology (NYUAD CGSB), shed new light on the evolutionary history of one of the earliest domesticated tree crops in the world, which remains a major fruit crop in North Africa and the Middle East.