23-12-2021, 02:53 PM
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.
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.