Biocodicology - A Deeper Dive

[Koen G]

Obtaining comparison DNA may not be your first problem. It seems that everything builds upon a basis of our ability to date a DNA sample, right? How accurately and reliably can we do this? For the VM, the difference between 1420 and 1450 may be significant. If the VM was penned in 1420, the primary owner may have died already by 1450 and the MS changed hands several times. It may be different, but we cannot know to what extent ca. 1450 DNA still has ties to the original makers.

So the first question is, before anything else, how accurately and confidently can we date human DNA samples? If this cannot be done down to a few decades, the exercise would be futile.