A July 2026 paper sequenced material from the Shroud of Turin. Karl Popper's test shows which of its claims can bear weight and which cannot.
The age of the Shroud of Turin "couldn't be determined through metagenomics". The sentence comes from the authors of the newest DNA study of the cloth, led by Gianni Barcaccia with Alessandro Achilli as last author, in Scientific Reports on the Nature site. It takes DNA out of the dating argument by the authors' own account. Popper's test sorts the paper into claims that could have failed and claims that could not.
The paper, published open access on 9 July 2026 under the title "DNA signatures preserved in the official 1978 sample collection of the Shroud of Turin", did not sample the cloth afresh. Barcaccia, Achilli and their colleagues worked on twelve samples from the 1978 collection: seven glass tubes of linen filaments, four jars of vacuum dust (one of them empty) and a microscope slide holding a tiny biological fragment. The DNA came from that collection, not from the reliquary that held the cloth. They used PCR-free shotgun sequencing and metagenomic analysis, with mitochondrial DNA and proteomics alongside.
The authors report "clear signatures of modern DNA contamination". They say the Shroud "came into contact with multiple individuals", and that most human mitochondrial DNA matches the collector's lineage. A cloth handled by many hands carries many hands' DNA.