As unlikely as it may sound, the great many recent advances in genetics and DNA technology look set to revolutionise the study of literature through the collection and identification of genetic material contained in the DNA of ancient books. Many thousands of fragile ancient and medieval texts remain in existence today, however literary scholars have long struggled to definitively determine both the time and place of origin of the vast majority of these surviving works and decry the traditional methods for doing so, relying on dialect and handwriting analyses, as inexact processes which are inherently unreliable and involve much conjecture. Now however the early results of new research, begun in January of this year by a multidisciplinary team of American researchers including scholars of biology, literature, history and anthropology, suggest that genetic analyses, through a novel application of DNA extraction, analysis and sequencing techniques, holds the key to reliably determining textual provenance.
Though the notion of books possessing DNA which may be manipulated using genetic analyses is counterintuitive, one must bear in mind that what we are dealing with here are ancient and medieval manuscripts authored at a time when the custom was to record written works on parchment. Parchment is essentially animal skin; the washed, stretched, dried, cut and bound hide of ancient livestock and herd animals such as cows, sheep and goats. Enter the applicability of genetics and DNA technology: the parchment which makes up the pages of these texts is animal matter, thus it is likely that the animal DNA may be recovered from these early books. Initial DNA testing experiments indicated that a sufficient amount of DNA to make analysis possible remained intact in many animal skin parchment pages. Subsequently the researchers have, by making a half centimetre hole in a page, successfully extracted and analysed preserved cow DNA, specifically mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), from a 15th-century prayer book; they are now working to refine these DNA extraction and analysis techniques so as they way be undertaken without harming the physical integrity of the subject book.
The ultimate goal of the research is to, utilising DNA sequencing techniques, develop a DNA-database to serve as a tool for the authoritative determination of the temporal and geographical origins of ancient texts. By extracting, analysing and sequencing the DNA of those precious few ancient texts of known providence (such as calendars and authenticated historical accounts) , it is hoped that this genetic material may be used as a type of genetic baseline or yardstick for dating and localising texts of which the origins are unknown. This will essentially involve assessing the genetic relationships amongst different texts: scientists will determine the mitochondrial DNA sequence of a text of unknown origin and then compare this with the DNA markers of a text of known origin (obtained from the database). Through this DNA comparison, the scientist obtains data about the degree of relationship between the known and unknown samples and the idea is that this data is used to identify genetic similarities indicating the time and place of origin of the text of previously unknown providence.
Source Article:
http://www.scientistlive.com/European-Science-News/Genetics/Unlocking_the_secrets_of_medieval_manuscripts/21525/
Nicholas Phillips
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