The Voynich Ninja

(20-12-2021, 01:25 AM)MichelleL11 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.TLDR – The Campana et al. results reflect an unhelpful mixture of bovine, ovine, caprine, and human DNA sequences which appear to be cross-contamination from the parchment production process.

Although this could be a result of using later more “industrially” produced parchment this isn’t entirely true because at least one other group testing leather had a similar result to theirs.  At this point in the development of the testing process, it looks like significant modifications of the testing method will have to be made for parchment to get useful results.

Do you have any idea what better test method could be used for leather / parchment ? Is there already any progress in development here ( since 2010 ) ?

Is "TLDR" the abbreviation for "transposons from Long DNA Reads" ?

(21-12-2021, 02:51 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you have any idea what better test method could be used for leather / parchment ? Is there already any progress in development here ( since 2010 ) ?

Is "TLDR" the abbreviation for "transposons from Long DNA Reads" ?

Hi, bi3mw:

Yes, the point of the upcoming reviews will be what modifications from standard DNA sequencing approaches have been taken to get better results.  Some of them involve completely different tests, measuring other molecules than DNA.  But l do think it’s important to understand the compromises that are made so the limitations of the measurements are clear.

Sorry - TLDR stands for “too long didn’t read” - guess l’ve been hanging around the internet a bit too much, lately?

I think l know which article I’m going to do next and will try to post soon.  There will be an attempt to compare and contrast - as this article’s results are more useful.  But l will try to emphasize what decisions are likely the reason for the better results.

I wonder if it is possible.

When different skins are treated in the same tanning solution, whether DNA can be released and absorbed and stored by another skin.

I think that that kind of cross-contamination is not only possible but likely. Not just using the same solution, but the same container, the same lunellum, the same stretching frame, all could lead to remnants from one type of skin ending up on another. 

In terms of relevance to the VMS, if every leaf were analyzed the results MIGHT give us more evidence about the original quire structure by allowing us to group bifolia according to skins, especially in the herbal section. The results will not tell us anything really useful about where the manuscript was produced, though. That will have to wait until a truly gigantic number (hundreds of thousands) of skins of KNOWN date/place of origin can be analyzed and put into a searchable database.

In the current circumstances (COVID-induced library closures, staff working remotely, etc.), it is simply impossible for this kind of work to be done on the VMS. Even someday when things are "back to normal," I think it is unlikely that the curator, conservator, and Beinecke Director would allow it.

(22-12-2021, 07:52 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think it is unlikely that the curator, conservator, and Beinecke Director would allow it.

At least Raymond Clemens mentioned such a test in an interview with DisInfluence, but he spoke of a period of twenty years (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

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I think is reasonable to say that if technological process continues at its present rate then there will come a point where the kind of techniques discussed will be in some way feasible and be able to be implemented with virtually no damage done to the manuscript. However the length of time before such a stage is reached is much harder to guess. Whether it is in 10 years, 20 years or 30 years remains to be seen. Of course by that time those techniques may have become unnecessary as the manuscript may have already been translated/deciphered.

I still think finding a way to isolate and identify the author(s)' DNA is the really interesting thing.

(22-12-2021, 09:14 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I still think finding a way to isolate and identify the author(s)' DNA is the really interesting thing.

As a step towards that it could be useful to try to identify Wilfrid Voynich's DNA on the manuscript.
If that can't be done, there would be no point in attempting to go even further back.

(23-12-2021, 02:34 AM)DONJCH Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(22-12-2021, 09:14 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I still think finding a way to isolate and identify the author(s)' DNA is the really interesting thing.

As a step towards that it could be useful to try to identify Wilfrid Voynich's DNA on the manuscript.
If that can't be done, there would be no point in attempting to go even further back.

Why would we be interested in finding Wilfred Voynich's DNA? Nobody seems to doubt that he had contact with the manuscript. And why do you think Wilfred Voynich's DNA will be necessarily easier to isolate than that of the author(s)'?

Imagine if Wilfrid's DNA were the only human DNA definitively identified on the manuscript. That would be Rich, pun intended.

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.

Isolating human DNA on specimens is a staple of detective stories and crime dramas these days, and is relatively helpful when there are a limited number of suspects, all of them either living or recently deceased. It's a whole different story when the pool of potential sources for that DNA spans continents and centuries.

All of my known recent ancestors come from the British Isles. When I sent in my saliva to 23andMe.com, I was astonished to find that my DNA is 4% typically Finnish, and 1% typically Yakut! I said to myself, There must be a good story there, that's been lost to the sands of time. And while that data got my imagination spinning about one of my great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers having an illicit tryst with one of the local indigenous men while on a Siberian expedition a couple of centuries ago, I can't ignore the fact that there are much more prosaic explanations for this finding, none of them involving me having any actual Yakut (or Finnish) ancestry. The most likely of these explanations is sampling error and 23andMe.com's labs interpreting noise as signal, and the next most likely is that large human populations carry richer assortments of mutations than many of us realize.

Getting back to the original post, I could imagine that livestock DNA correlates much better with places of origin over time, than human DNA does, since livestock do not move around and reproduce of their own accord nearly as much as humans do.

(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. 

That's what I was thinking as well. Even if a determination were conclusive (e.g. a DNA strain from a specific region in Europe), this still wouldn't allow us to eliminate much. It wouldn't even eliminate New World theories.

DNA from the vellum itself might be more interesting, especially since Ray Clemens does not oppose the idea. 

(I am now imagining a scenario in the distant future where all medieval herds are known. Every new manuscript that is sampled can be confidently matched to a certain lineage. Finally it is time to sample the VM and sequence its genome. With great anticipation, it is now compared to the database, which contains thousands of samples. It matches nothing.)