Biocodicology - A Deeper Dive

[Mark Knowles]

The manuscript is six hundred years old. Even if only two different humans handled it each year, that's more than 1,200 different opportunities for epithelial or other cells to be left behind (including mine!), and that doesn't include the multiple humans who helped to create it: slaughter and skin the calves, prepare the parchment, mix the ink, grind the pigment, write the text, paint the illustrations, organize the sheets and quires, sew the quires and attach them to the binding, etc.

The best places to look for cellular debris in any manuscript would be along the edges (where hands turn pages) and in the gutters (where there isn't much airflow).

Maybe I have taken too much interest in true crime. I do get the impression that specialists are able to isolate specific DNA from absolutely minuscule samples and in unexpected and ingenious ways.

It also seems to me that DNA science has come a very long way in the last 20 years and where it will be in the next 20 years, who knows?

I should have been more specific to have said scribe(s)' rather than author(s)'. As you point out the idea of an author is a more nebulous concept. So I would be talking about a scribe's DNA or the DNA of more than one scribe. The association between scribes and authors as distinct or the same is a separate determination. Here I include illustrator(s) amongst scribes. Basically I mean people who were physically involved with writing/drawing the original text/illustrations on the manuscript.

You are absolutely correct that one would expect a very large number of samples of all sorts of peoples' DNA on the manuscript that is why I wonder what ways there might be to distinguish the scribe(s)' DNA from the rest of the DNA. I would imagine that the scribe(s)' DNA is more likely to be found in certain places where other DNA might not be found that is why I suggested looking for DNA in the ink, where other DNA is much less likely to be found.

Maybe I have too much faith in what science might be capable of and what clever ways there might be to isolate the DNA of individuals that we are interested without getting bogged down in all the DNA of individuals that we are not interested in.

The cost and simplicity of DNA sequencing has improved leaps and bounds in recent decades, so it may be that extracting the DNA of the 1000+ different people to have interacted with a given page of the manuscript over the years could be done with no harm to the manuscript. Potentially then all those 1000ish people could be identified and eliminated from interest. 1000ish people seems like a lot of people to eliminate, but there may be ways of eliminating many of them relatively quickly.

I wonder if there are ways of guessing what era some DNA may date from. From my understanding harmless mutations accumulate over time and often can be used as specific flags for specific changes(Kohamin markers). Can epigenetics be relevant here? I saw an article looking at using the recombination clock to date DNA, but I don't know of that will work over the Voynich timescale. If it is possible to date DNA then lots of DNA samples can be eliminated on the basis that they are not old enough.

I am sure there are plenty of other strategies for isolating scribe DNA that haven't even occurred to me.

It will be interesting to see if this becomes possible in the future.