Researchers looked past the text in archived ancient documents to gain insight into the history of agricultural development.
A team of scientists used genetic sequencing techniques to see what secrets the parchment held, Trinity College Dublin reported. To make their findings the researchers extracted DNA and proteins from parchment dating back to the 17th and 18th centuries, allowing them to determine from what animals the material was made from.
"This pilot project suggests that parchments are an amazing resource for genetic studies that consider agricultural development over the centuries. There must be millions stored away in libraries, archives, [lawyer's] offices and even in our own attics. After all, parchment was the writing material of choice for thousands of years, going back to the Dead Sea Scrolls," said Daniel Bradley, professor of population genetics at Trinity College Dublin.
Wool was an important commodity during the time of the scrolls, and these types of studies shed light on how humans affected the genetics of sheep throughout the years as well as the history of animal husbandry.
The first parchment sample was linked to northern Britain, where black-faced sheep breeds such as Swaledale, Rough Fell and Scottish Blackface are the norm. The second sample was more closely tied to Midlands and southern Britain. If other samples show similar levels of DNA content it could provide more insight into the breeding history of livestock during and after the agricultural movement of the 18th century.
"We believe the two specimens derive from an unimproved northern hill-sheep typical in Yorkshire in the 17th century, and from a sheep derived from the 'improved' flocks, such as those bred in the Midlands by Robert Bakewell, which were spreading through England in the 18th century. We want to understand the history of agriculture in these islands over the last 1,000 years and, with this breath-taking resource, we can," said Matthew Collins, of the archaeology department at York, who also heads the university's BioArCh research center.
The findings were published in a recent edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
