This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Humans and domesticated animals have lived together for millennia, and this relationship has shaped their destinies in countless ways. Animals offered people food, companionship, traction (pulling plows), clothing and transportation.
They also provided something less obvious but extraordinarily important: parchment to write on. This robust, plentiful and portable material enabled many people to record and store their histories in the days before mass-produced paper. Parchment was made from the skins of a range of animals.
At a workshop in Malta, one of us (Kevin) saw firsthand how quickly these skins can be transformed into parchment suitable for writing. After the skins are soaked in vats of water containing quicklime, flesh and hair are removed using hefty blades and elbow grease. The skins are then stretched on frames overnight or longer, leaving a taut membrane that needs only smoothing and light treatment to be ready for use.
Within days, biological tissue becomes a remarkably durable historical material. Parchment has another fascinating quality. It preserves DNA from the animal killed to make it.
Our latest study shows that DNA can survive in parchment (even if fragmented) for well over a thousand years, although the precise time depends on how well the parchment has been archived and stored. As researchers of how livestock were used in early societies, this raised other intriguing questions for us. Could biological traces of infection survive a skin's transformation into parchment if the animal was infected with a disease when it died?
And if a pathogen (disease-causing organism) was present at a sufficiently high level, might some of its biological signatures remain preserved in the finished material many hundreds of years later? Two projects based at the University of York and the Bodleian Library in Oxford kindly allowed us to examine their genetic data from parchment primarily originating in central and western Europe. The skins came from cattle, sheep and goats, dated to roughly A.D. 700–1400 and had mostly been used in religious documents.
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