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Mark Knowles · 23-12-2021, 03:21 PM

(23-12-2021, 02:53 PM)RenegadeHealer wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm not sure much could be proven definitively by the isolation of human DNA from unknown and un-sequenced people on the manuscript, or any ancient artifact for that matter. In fact, I could see this opening up the field to all sorts of new red herrings. For example, say a bit of human DNA was scraped off a folio of the VMs, which was definitively identified as belonging to Y-DNA haplotype Q. Soon you've got a crank with a whole blog dedicated to resurrecting Janick and Tucker's New World origin theory, on the basis that most Native American males are haplotype Q.

One would expect that there are many different samples of human DNA somewhere on the manuscript given the number of different people who have come into contact with the manuscript. So how could one isolate the author(s)' ? There are two possibilities that occur to me as a non-specialist in this area:

1) Looking for a place or places in the manuscript where only the author(s)' DNA would be found. This is why I suggested looking for DNA sealed under the ink as this would be separated from later DNA.

2) Another option that I have no idea as to whether it is viable is to look for the most degraded DNA. I don't know if DNA becomes more degraded over time and therefore the older DNA would be the most degraded. I would think that even if DNA is degraded then a large enough sample would allow the reconstruction of the original DNA.

This may all be science fiction, though science fiction often one day becomes science reality.

If one manages to isolate and sequence the author(s)' DNA then there are a world of possibilities for isolating the author(s)' by geography and possibly even by name. There is an ever growing database of human DNA by region and from different eras. One can even identify distant familial relationships on the basis of DNA.(I was fascinated by how the Golden State Killer was identified.) In the future, if we are not already able to, we will be able to identify all sorts of characteristics from the author(s)' DNA gender(obviously), eye colour and well as all sorts of physical and mental characteristics.

In short, without having any expertise in this area, I would expect that there are huge possibilities. The key is really how long it will take before such scientific techniques are realised. 30 years is a long time in terms of the current rate of advance of science, so I would think that in less than 30 years this will be possible. However 30 years is also a long time in terms of our lifespans, so we may not want to wait. Of course this could conceivably be possible in much less than 30 years.