History Of Olive



		The Olive tree
	The Olive tree The most recent analysis of ancient botany confirms that wild olive trees existed around the Mediterranean. Various fossilized olive tree leaves and fragment of oleaster pits that have been found in Eneolithic and Bronze Age excavations allow us to state that there were olive trees there in the XII millennium B.C. But probably their ancestors had appeared in the Villefranche period according to some authors, or in the Tertiary Age according to others. Since then, they spontaneously grew and developed around the margins the mare Nostrum (Mediterranean). The cultivation of the Olive trees, is one of the oldest signs of civilization in the world. It even preceded writing. The Olive culture, derived from the benefits of Olive Oil, and the mythology linked to it spread through the Phoenicians to Greece, and from Greece to Rome, and then to the rest of the Western world. In the past few hundred years, the growth of Olive has spread to the Americas, Japan, Australia, and South Africa. Nevertheless, until this day around 99 percent of all olive oil still spills from the rim of the Mediterranean.