This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata.The Dead Sea Scrolls are religious manuscripts that were written from the third century B.C.E. to the first century C.E.They were discovered in the 1940s and '50s in caves along the shore of the Dead Sea.The parchments have been the topic of intense religious, literary and historical debate.They also continue to be the subject of scientific analysis―including DNA."The idea was to try to match and piece apart fragments based on their genetic identity―namely based on the animals from which they were made."Oded Rechavi is a molecular biologist Tel Aviv University.His team sequenced the DNA from bits of scroll dust."Almost all the scrolls we sampled were perhaps surprisingly found to be made out of sheep skin.We found two that were made out of cow skin, that is a big story."Here Rechavi's colleague Noam Mizrahi from the university's department of biblical studies picked up the story.The scrolls, he says, came from a place called Qumran, a three day's walk from the cultural center of Jerusalem.Mizrahi explains that the people of Qumran were an extremist group, with apocalyptic predictions, who harshly criticized the views of others.Therefore, he says, there's been long-standing debateabout how much the scrolls―unearthed from this sect in Qumran―represented just this faction's views or more general Jewish thought at the time.The presence of cow skins in a desert region, inhospitable to cattle, is provocative because it suggests this...
