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baywax
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As I remember it this piece of cloth, which now sits in a church in Turin Italy, was carbon dated to around a date between 1200 and 1400 AD. It was also inspected for pollen and other microscopic evidence to determine an origin of the cloth. The official results were that the pollen was from the middle east. There have been several explanations about the shroud that range from religious accounts of a figure radiating their image into the cloth to scandalous accounts of 13th century methods of photography being used to fool the clerics of the time.
http://skepdic.com/shroud.html
What, if anything, have you found out about this anomaly?
shroud of Turin
"All empirical evidence and logical reasoning concerning the Shroud of Turin will lead any objective, rational person to the firm conclusion that the Shroud is an artifact created by an artist in the fourteenth-century." --Steven D. Schafersman
The shroud of Turin is a woven cloth about 14 feet long and 3.5 feet wide with an image of a man on it. Actually, it has two images, one frontal and one rear, with the heads meeting in the middle. It has been noted that if the shroud were really wrapped over a body there should be a space where the two heads meet. And the head is 5% too large for its body, the nose is disproportionate, and the arms are too long. Nevertheless, the image is believed by many to be a negative image of the crucified Christ and the shroud is believed to be his burial shroud. Most skeptics think the image is a painting and a pious hoax. The shroud is kept in the cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy.
Apparently, the first historical mention of the shroud as the "shroud of Turin" is in the late 16th century when the shroud was brought to the cathedral in that city, though it allegedly was discovered in Turkey during one of the so-called "Holy" Crusades in the so-called "Middle" Ages. In 1988, the Vatican allowed the shroud to be dated by three independent sources--Oxford University, the University of Arizona, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology--and each of them dated the cloth as originating in medieval times, around 1350. The shroud allegedly was in a fire during the early part of the 16th century and, according to believers in the shroud's authenticity, that is what accounts for the carbon dating of the shroud as being no more than 650 years old. To non-believers, this sounds like an ad hoc hypothesis.
According to microchemist Dr. Walter McCrone,
The suggestion that the 1532 Chambery fire changed the date of the cloth is ludicrous. Samples for C-dating are routinely and completely burned to CO2 as part of a well-tested purification procedure. The suggestions that modern biological contaminants were sufficient to modernize the date are also ridiculous. A weight of 20th century carbon equaling nearly two times the weight of the Shroud carbon itself would be required to change a 1st century date to the 14th century (see Carbon 14 graph). Besides this, the linen cloth samples were very carefully cleaned before analysis at each of the C-dating laboratories.*
http://skepdic.com/shroud.html
What, if anything, have you found out about this anomaly?