DNA Found On The Shroud Of Turin Is Forcing Scientists To Rethink Everything

The Shroud of Turin has been called a medieval forgery since 1988, when radiocarbon dating placed it between twelve sixty and thirteen ninety AD. Case closed — until scientists started pulling DNA from the dust.
In 2015, geneticist Gianni Barcaccia at the University of Padua extracted genomic DNA from dust particles vacuumed from the Shroud's surface and published the results in Scientific Reports. The human mitochondrial DNA came from multiple individuals spanning haplogroups typical of Western Europe, the Near East, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent. Plant DNA told a similar story — Mediterranean clovers and ryegrasses alongside East Asian pear and plum species and North American black locust trees. The oldest and most abundant DNA fragments traced back to lineages found primarily in India, raising the possibility the linen itself was manufactured on the subcontinent. The blood on the cloth had already been typed as AB positive — a rare group globally but more common in the Middle East — from a human male. The DNA neither confirmed nor debunked authenticity, but it mapped a journey across continents that no medieval European forger could easily explain.
Then in 2022, Liberato De Caro at Italy's Institute of Crystallography applied Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering to a tiny Shroud sample. The structural aging of the cellulose matched linen from the Siege of Masada — dated fifty-five to seventy-four AD. Statistical reanalysis of the original 1988 radiocarbon raw data — locked away for twenty-eight years — revealed the samples showed a spatial age gradient suggesting contamination was never fully removed. The debate is no longer closed. It may just be starting.
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📚 SOURCES:

Barcaccia, G. et al. — "Uncovering the Sources of DNA Found on the Turin Shroud," Scientific Reports (2015)
De Caro, L. et al. — "X-ray Dating of a Turin Shroud's Linen Sample," Heritage (2022)
Damon, P.E. et al. — "Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin," Nature (1989)
Riani, M. & Atkinson, A.C. — "Regression Analysis with Partially Labeled Regressors: Carbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin," Statistical Computing (2013)
Casabianca, T. et al. — "Radiocarbon Dating of the Turin Shroud: New Evidence from Raw Data," Archaeometry (2019)
Dreschnack, P.A. — "An Analysis of the DNA and Hematological Findings of the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo," Harvard (2023)

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