Page 8 - Finger Bone News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> okay. well, we'll just have to see how it goes, i think. >> in kansas city, professor tom higham of oxford university is trying to figure out a way of drilling into a relic of john the baptist. >> i think it's best to go in here. >> 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. that's the protein part. and that, in modern people, is about 20% by weight. but of course, in older materials, the collagen decays...

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 ...

>> should we get the bone out and 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's 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 finger containing collagen, the most reliable material for carbon dating. >> it's very tricky in order to get a decent-sized sampl...

Accelerator mass spectrometer. the machine will analyze the amount of radiocarbon in the sample and, through that, determine the relic's age. >> using scientific techniques now for first time it's really possible to build up a template of scientific similarities between different individuals who 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. theynly an oit for a final answer. could this bone belong to john the baptist? this holiday season, people have a lot to say about the chevy r...

They want to analyze an ancient treasure reputed to be the finger of john the baptist. could it come from the same individual as the bulgaria find? >> this is containing the relic. it's gilt silver. it dates from about the year 1400. >> what's really exciting about the kansas relic is for the first time we'll be able to compare the carbon data relic with the one we've already obtained from bulgaria. >> the bone has been identified as a human bone coming from a hand. >> what's interesting about the finger is it's part of a medieval treasure, the guelph treasure, that has connections with the ge...