Page 15 - Finger Bone News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

To john the baptist. and they can't all be. in this particular case, using radiocarbon, we've managed to show that the date from this particular bone is about six centuries later than it ought to be. >> we've tested now two relics of john the baptist. we had one date from the 1st century and one from the 7th or 8th century and we're just starting to get a feel for what there is out there. so it's very exciting. it gives us a new bit of information. i'm hopeful that we'll go forward from here and ask more questions and test more relics. >> for tom and george, the investigation goes on. with as ...

Amount of radio carbon in the sample and through that, determine the relic's age. >> using scientific techniques now for the first time it's possible to build a template of scientific similarities between different individuals to understand more about the movement and the passage of relics across this part of the world during the first millennium a.d. >> now the scientists' work is done. they can only wait for a final answer. could this bone belong to john the baptist? hey, girl. is it crazy that your soccer trophy is talking to you right now? it kinda is. it's as crazy as you not rolling over...

♪ ♪ >> we know that he visited constantinople and requested relics, but it's possible it may have had origins much older than that. ♪ ♪ should we have a look at it now? >> sitting in an elaborate gilt housing dating back to the 14th century, for the researchers, the challenge will be how to remove the bone from its precious casing. ♪ ♪ and when they try to extract the bone from its mount, there is a problem. >> the mount does not come off of the bone. >> oh, you mean, i can't actually take the bone out? >> no. >> and that means tom will struggle to reach the central part of the fin...

Be punished! you've done this before. you know what you're doing. >> we'll just have to see how it goes. >> in kansas city, professor tom hi, hiam of oxford university is trying to drill into the relic of john the baptist. he hopes to date the carbon inside the bone and perhaps even get a dna profile that can then be matched against the first century relic he has already tested from bulgaria. >> it's the collagen part of the bone that we want to date and that's the protein part and that in modern people is 20% by weight and in older material the collagen decays and degrades and so it's often n...

Baptist. ♪ ♪ ♪ >> guards! >> i think what john the baptist realizes that herod is going to execute him is this astonishing sense of ending and conclusion and he knew, as a prophet, this is the completion of a prophetic call. >> the scientific quest to date the kansas city finger bone attributed to john the baptist is reaching its climax. successful in retrieving enough material for an accurate reading, at oxford university's archaeology research lab, they prepare the sample for the accelerator mass spectrometer. the machine will analyze the