Biocodicology - A Deeper Dive

[Mark Knowles]

It seems that everything builds upon a basis of our ability to date a DNA sample, right?

I addressed this in my previous two posts.

For me that is not really the key difficulty. For me the key difficulty is how much DNA did the scribe leave behind and how degraded that DNA is 600 years later. If the scribe left lots of DNA on the manuscript and it hasn't degraded a lot then obtaining a sample of scriba DNA should not be so difficult I would guess.

I don't know how one would estimate how much DNA the scribe left on the manuscript and I don't how degraded 600 year old "Touch DNA" would be today. I am not yet completely sure also where the best places to look to take a sample of the scribe's DNA from. (Is there anywhere where the scribe might have left his saliva, hair or even blood in the manuscript? As this would be a gold mine for DNA I would have thought.)