The Shroud of Turin is covered in carrot and cat DNA, casting fresh doubt on its Biblical origins.
Since medieval times some believers have claimed that the cloth, kept in the Italian city’s Chapel of the Holy Shroud, is a relic of the crucifixion.
It bears a faint image of a man with a resemblance to depictions of Jesus Christ and some say it is stained with Christ’s blood.
Since it first emerged in 1354 in the French village of Lirey, the authenticity of the 4.4 by 1.1 metre textile has been questioned, with it now widely thought to be a medieval hoax.
A carbon-dating study conducted in 1989 placed the cloth’s creation between 1260 and 1390, with historians also noting there is no evidence that the type of loom required to produce such fabric existed in the Mediterranean at the time of Jesus.
In 2015, a team led by Professor Gianni Barcaccia of the University of Padova proposed that the cloth may have been made in India, based on genetic material collected from it in 1978.
Now, using more advanced techniques, the researchers have re-examined those samples.
Their latest findings, published on the preprint server bioRxiv in March but not yet peer-reviewed, have revealed numerous DNA samples – including carrots and cats.
Animal DNA made up a significant portion of the findings, with cats and dogs accounting for around 44%.
Plant DNA was similarly diverse. Carrot DNA represented roughly a third of plant material, alongside wheat, maize, rye and a range of fruits and vegetables.
Some of the plants present, including bananas, potatoes and tomatoes, were only introduced to Europe after the 16th century.
‘Carrot is the most prominent crop plant species identified in the Shroud,’ the team writes in its paper, adding that though carrots were present in Jesus’ time, these were likely later cultivars.
‘Wild populations of carrots with white roots have existed in Europe for more than two thousand years, as they were described by Pliny the Elder in the encyclopedic Naturalis Historia and used by Romans for medicinal purposes and food preparations (see Apicius, De re culinaria a collection of Roman cookery recipes),’ they explained.
(Picture: Cover Media)
‘However, we demonstrated that the carrot DNA found on the Shroud is genetically more similar to early cultivars and improved cultivars, which were proven to descend from orange carrot varieties developed in Europe between the 15th and 16th centuries.’
They also warned that the DNA finds seemed to back up the hypothesis that the shroud was a medieval fake, rather than genuine cloth from the crucifixion.
Solanaceae crops (e.g. tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes), and peanuts (Fabaceae), which are crop plants native to Latin America, pose a significant new conundrum about the antiquity of the Shroud, even if a later contamination cannot be ruled out, they say.
‘The prevalence of Mediterranean crops and the absence of typical Middle Eastern flora raise questions about the agricultural landscape when the Shroud was created or used as a burial cloth.’
The findings appear to confirm the medieval origin of the shroud, although with the possibility of later contamination not definitively ruled out, there’s no doubt the debate will rage on.