Carrot, bread wheat, peanuts, tomatoes, and maize, not exactly what you'd expect to find on a cloth believed by millions to have wrapped the body of Jesus Christ. Yet a preprint study published in March on bioRxiv reports that researchers identified DNA from all of those species, and many more, embedded in microscopic dust and fibers collected from the Shroud of Turin decades ago.
The findings come from an analysis of samples taken from the relic in 1978. An international team of researchers sequenced DNA fragments from those samples and catalogued an unexpectedly broad range of plant species, including several crops that did not exist in the Old World until after 1492. Fox News Digital reported that the presence of New World species such as tomatoes, maize, and peanuts points to contamination that accumulated long after the cloth's earliest documented history.
The study did not find visible food scraps. Instead, scientists recovered trace-level genetic material, microscopic fragments lodged in fibers and dust that had settled on the Shroud over the course of its long public life. The results paint a picture not of a pristine relic sealed away from the world, but of a cloth that absorbed biological material from the people, places, and foods around it for hundreds of years.
Carrot DNA dominated the plant sequences, accounting for roughly 30.9 percent of identified material. The researchers noted that the carrot DNA more closely resembled cultivated varieties than wild strains. Bread wheat came in second at about 11.6 percent.
But the catalogue went far beyond root vegetables and grain. The study identified durum wheat, einkorn wheat, rye, and maize among cereals. Horticultural crops included peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes, all members of the Solanaceae family, along with melons or cucumbers from the Cucurbitaceae family.
Fruit tree DNA showed up as well. The researchers reported signals from banana, almond, walnut, and sweet orange, with fainter traces from fig, pistachio, apple, pear, hazelnut, and grapevine. The study also noted a "strong presence of peanuts" and weaker traces of perennial ryegrass, bluegrass, fescue, oats, and clovers.
For anyone keeping track, that is an entire Mediterranean pantry, plus a few items that could only have arrived from the Americas after Columbus. The timeline matters. If tomatoes, maize, and peanuts left their DNA on the cloth, they did so no earlier than the late fifteenth century. That fact alone tells researchers the Shroud was exposed to outside biological material well into the modern era.
The Shroud of Turin has been housed in Turin, Italy, since 1578, though its documented history stretches back to the mid-fourteenth century. It remains one of the most studied and debated religious artifacts in the world. For believers, it is the burial cloth of Christ, bearing a faint image of a crucified man. For skeptics, it is a medieval creation.
Radiocarbon dating conducted in 1988 placed the cloth's origin between 1260 and 1390 A.D., squarely in the medieval period. That finding has been contested ever since, with critics arguing the tested sample may have been taken from a repaired section of the fabric. In 2024, Italy's Institute of Crystallography weighed in with its own analysis using wide-angle X-ray scattering, or WAXS, and said its results were consistent with the Shroud being a roughly 2,000-year-old relic.
The new DNA study does not settle the age dispute. Its authors stated plainly that the Shroud's age "cannot be determined through metagenomics because this methodology is unable to provide any robust evidence supporting either a medieval origin or a history dating back two millennia." In other words, the genetic data tells us what touched the cloth, not when the cloth was made.
That honesty is refreshing. In an era when scientific studies are routinely stretched beyond their evidence to serve a preferred narrative, these researchers drew a clear line around what their work can and cannot prove. DNA evidence has reshaped cold cases and rewritten criminal histories, but it has limits, and acknowledging those limits is the mark of serious science.
A separate layer of the DNA analysis adds another wrinkle. The New York Post reported that the same preprint study found mixed genetic material from humans, plants, and animals on the Shroud. Roughly 40 percent of the human DNA traces pointed to Indian-related lineages, raising the possibility that the yarn itself was produced in India or that the cloth passed through the hands of people with Indian ancestry during its long life.
The research team wrote that "the DNA traces found on the Shroud of Turin suggest the potentially extensive exposure of the cloth in the Mediterranean region and the possibility that the yarn was produced in India." Anders Götherström of Stockholm University offered a more skeptical take, telling reporters, "I still see no reason to doubt that the shroud is French and from the 13th to 14th century."
Neither conclusion is definitive. The Indian DNA could reflect the origin of the raw material, centuries of handling by diverse populations, or some combination. What it does confirm is that the Shroud has been touched by many hands across many centuries, a fact that complicates any attempt to use biological traces as proof of a single origin point.
The researchers framed their findings as a contribution to understanding the Shroud's preservation history rather than its authenticity. They wrote that their results "constitute a novel and significant contribution to the field, thoroughly elucidating the biological traces left by centuries of social, cultural and ecological engagement."
They added: "Collectively, our findings illuminate important aspects of the Shroud's preservation history." The language is measured. The researchers declined to provide comment to Fox News Digital beyond what appeared in the preprint.
For the faithful, this study changes little. The presence of carrot DNA or tomato traces does not disprove a first-century origin any more than it proves one. What it does show is that the Shroud has lived a very human life, handled, displayed, stored, and exposed to the ordinary biological debris of the cultures that revered it. Faith and science have always had an uneasy relationship when it comes to relics, and Christian faith continues to shape public life in ways that no laboratory can fully measure.
The Shroud of Turin occupies a unique space in Western civilization. It is simultaneously a scientific puzzle, a devotional object, and a cultural touchstone. Every few years a new study lands, and the cycle repeats: headlines declare the mystery solved, partisans on both sides claim vindication, and the cloth itself endures, silent, ambiguous, and still drawing millions of pilgrims to Turin.
What this latest study actually demonstrates is the limits of trying to reduce a question of faith to a question of genetics. The researchers themselves acknowledged as much. Their data cannot tell us whether the Shroud wrapped the body of Christ. It can tell us that someone, at some point, got carrot near it.
The broader cultural moment matters here. Christians around the world face increasing pressure to justify their beliefs in secular terms, to produce the lab report, the peer-reviewed paper, the data set. People of faith have faced institutional hostility from quarters that claim to champion tolerance. The Shroud debate is a milder version of the same dynamic: the demand that belief submit itself entirely to empirical adjudication.
That demand misunderstands what the Shroud means to the people who venerate it. For them, its significance does not rise or fall with a DNA sequencing run. Christians worldwide continue to face challenges far more pressing than the provenance of a linen cloth, and they meet those challenges with the same faith that has sustained the Shroud's place in the human story for centuries.
The preprint remains just that, a preprint, not yet peer-reviewed. Several open questions linger. The exact authors of the study are unnamed in available reporting. The sample collection procedures from 1978 are not detailed. Whether non-plant DNA traces were catalogued beyond the human lineage data remains unclear. And whether the study will survive peer review is anyone's guess.
Still, the work is a reminder that the Shroud is not a museum piece sealed behind glass. It has been part of the living world, touched, breathed on, prayed over, and apparently dusted with the remnants of meals eaten nearby. That is not a scandal. That is what happens to something people love enough to keep close for seven hundred years, or perhaps two thousand.
In an age when faith and public life remain deeply intertwined, the Shroud endures not because science has validated it, but because millions of people do not need a lab to tell them what they believe.
Science can catalog the carrots. It cannot catalog the faith. And that, for believers, is rather the point.
