The Voynich Ninja

(06-01-2022, 10:09 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.First and foremost anyone interested (and capable) of carrying out such analyses on the VM must demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of the proposed methods and the significance of potential results in relation to the expected damage to the manuscript. The boundaries of current technology could relatively easily be tested on less valuable documents, same for the proteome of the parchment or albumen in paint. I'm sure a lot is possible and even more will be in the near future but the VM is not the right proving ground for experiments.

I completely agree. I don't think any such method should be employed unless it is a proven technique and it can be shown to cause less damage to the manuscript than the carbon dating did.

I would think it will take some time before the techniques necessary to do this, if possible, exist. But in the next 10, 20 or 30 years if advancements continues at the same pace then it seems far from inconceivable that it may well be possible.

I thought this interesting and relevant:

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It made me wonder if there is anywhere the scribe might have left saliva or even hair.

Mark, many people wet their fingers to turn the pages. According to the top or unden in the corner. This does not say whether it was the writer, only that someone has turned the page.

One must also remain realistic.
If I take a barleycorn from a bag, now I could determine the plant, if I still find the dry litter.
No matter how it sounds now, I have the better chances here, because I already know that it is the right barleycorn.
Theory and practice.

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(07-01-2022, 11:28 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Mark, many people wet their fingers to turn the pages. According to the top or unden in the corner. This does not say whether it was the writer, only that someone has turned the page.

I wasn't really thinking of the area where someone holds the page in order to turn it(probably around the corner or edge). At that location many people will leave their DNA. However there are locations on the page where most people will not leave their DNA, but in which the author would have.

I still don't see how this would help us, and can't think of any situation where the net result would be positive. Say a sample is taken and intact DNA is recovered. What happens next in the most optimistic scenario?

(07-01-2022, 12:08 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Say a sample is taken and intact DNA is recovered. What happens next in the most optimistic scenario?

If the sample of DNA is a scribe's then that can be sequenced. The degree of degradation of the sample should give some idea of the age of the DNA. If it is not the scribe's then it is not much use unless it is from someone else before the era of Emperor Rudolf II. If it is not from the scribe, but from someone who handled the manuscript 50 years after the writing of the manuscript it still would be of significant interest. Then I speculate that the sequence can be compared against the large database of modern human DNA such as in ancestry databases. So as in the case of the identification of the "Golden State killer" one can identify the closest relatives. The more closely related two people are the longer the sections of DNA that they share. So using such databases one could find the closest modern relatives and descendants. In addition that ought to predict the other descendants of the person in question who aren't on the database, but who can be asked if they would provide their DNA to confirm the theory. (I can't see many people objecting to the use of their DNA to determine whether they are related to the scribe from the Voynich manuscript.) Once we know the closest modern relatives this should give one some guide as to the rough area where the "scribe" came from. In addition if we know who the descendants of the scribe are then maybe as in the case of the "Golden State Killer" we can trace back their common ancestry and so potentially trace back the family tree to the scribe themselves. 600 years is a long way back to trace a family tree, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible. (It is possible that DNA can be taken from ancient bone samples if available from a place where a scribe or their relative is buried to verify common identity or ancestry.) It should be straightforward to determine the gender of the scribe which will help to resolve the question as to whether it was written by a group of women or not. Determining ancestry on the basis of historic records is hard as ancestral records, such as church records, can be incomplete, though in many places they can be quite thorough and are increasingly digitised. If our scribe is someone of some small importance then it should be easier to identify them. Determining from DNA what other characteristics they have might be useful. This is all certainly very optimistic, but from limited knowledge of the subject does not sound impossible. I don't think I need to explain how knowing the identity of the scribe will make a huge difference to Voynich research.

I am discussing what may be possible in the future i.e. 10, 20 or 30 years from now. These contemporary human DNA databases are growing all the time and the techniques for determining ancestry from this data are improving all the time. I wonder to what extent the compiling of historic DNA from known individuals is happening. The digitisation of historic ancestry records, like church records, is continuing, so the means to find historic ancestry is getting easier. The ability to determine an individual's characteristics from their DNA is improving all the time. So in many ways what I suggest is getting easier all the time; this does not mean in the end that it will be possible, but I don't think one can say that it is not possible.

For me personally it would be useful as I have a hypothesis as to who the scribe(s) could be and I know where a DNA of one of them could probably be obtained from his skeleton and I suspect the other scribes to be very closely related, so this could easily be determined from the DNA. Therefore this could help a lot to prove or disprove my hypothesis.

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.

There are two points as I see it:

1) I would suggest taking/looking for a location in the manuscript to take a sample(s) from where only the scribe left his/her DNA. This would avoid having to deal with many other samples of DNA to find the one you are looking for. Your typical reader will only touch the manuscript in the corner or on the sides and so will not leave significant DNA on or around the writing or images. However your scribe would be much more likely to leave DNA in those locations. So the idea that it would be necessary to pick one sample of DNA from amongst thousands doesn't arise and therefore dating the DNA becomes much less of an issue. I have suggested that the scribe(s)' DNA might be preserved in the ink where later DNA would not be found, but there maybe better locations in the manuscript to look for scribal DNA.

2) Supposing you isolate and sequence the DNA of someone from 1470 well that information would still be very useful as it could give an important clue into an early user or owner of the manuscript. People are very keen to know who owned the manuscript before Emperor Rudolf II, supposedly owned it. They wonder was it owned by John Dee etc. Knowing with whom the manuscript was with in 1470 would be very useful in tracing its history and who could well lead to finding the original creator of the manuscript or at least knowing in which part of the world/Europe it was in in 1470. So whilst sequencing the scribe's DNA would be preferable sequencing the DNA of an early owner would be far from useless.

I don't know how accurately DNA can be dated. I can look into this.