On Jul. 22, 2022, a team of scientists announced they had sequenced the genome of a 6,000-year-old citrullus seeds from Lybia that revealed the use of a bitter-fleshed species prior to watermelon domestication. The findings were published in Molecular Biology and Evolution.

An unexpected new insight is that Citrullus appears to have initially been collected or cultivated for its seeds, not its flesh, consistent with seed damage patterns induced by human teeth in the oldest Libyan material.