The Turin Shroud, which is believed to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, could be from the correct time period after all.
The cloth contains an imprint of what appears to be the image of a man. Radiocarbon dating carried out by Oxford University in 1988 determined the shroud was only 728 years old, suggesting it was "medieval forgery." New research suggests an earthquake in 33 A.D. may have interfered with those results, the Telegraph reported.
The 8.2 magnitude earthquake could have released "neutron particles from crushed rock." The neutron flow could have caused the X-ray-like image to appear and also increased the level of carbon-14 isotopes causing it to register as younger in radiocarbon dating.
"We believe it is possible that neutron emissions by earthquakes could have induced the image formation on the Shroud's linen [fibers], through thermal neutron capture on nitrogen nuclei, and could also have caused a wrong radiocarbon dating," said Professor Alberto Carpinteri, from the Politecnico di Torino
The study does not address why this phenomenon has not been seen in other artifacts from the same time period, LiveScience reported.
"It would have to be a really local effect not to be measurable elsewhere," Gordon Cook, a professor of environmental geochemistry at the University of Glasgow, told Live Science. "People have been measuring materials of that age for decades now and nobody has ever encountered this."
"One question that would need to be addressed is why the material here is affected, but other archaeological and geological material in the ground is not," Ramsey wrote in an email. "There are huge numbers of radiocarbon dates from the region for much older archaeological material, which certainly don't show this type of intense in-situ radiocarbon production (and they would be much more sensitive to any such effects)," Christopher Ramsey, director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit also told LiveScience.
Mark Antonacci, president of the Resurrection of the Shroud Foundation, has made a petition to the pope asking he allow modern molecular analysis of the shroud to find out its age once and for all, the Telegraph reported.
"If you want to believe in the Shroud of Turin, you believe in it," Cook told Live Science.
