DNA on the Shroud of Turin reveals plant, animal and human contaminants

By Philip Ball2026-07-24T08:38:00

An enhanced black and white image of the Turin Shroud featuring a faint image of a bearded man's face some a damaged cloth

Source: © Deloche Lissac/Getty Images

Peanuts, chickens and a researcher are among those who have left their mark on the cloth

Maybe the Shroud of Turin fascinates me so much because I was an editor at Nature when the journal published the supposedly definitive radiocarbon dating study in 1989 by teams in Oxford, Zurich and Arizona, which claimed ‘conclusive evidence’ that the linen from which this venerated relic is made is of medieval origin, dated to between 1260 and 1390.