Yeah, you know, we’ll get to touring.
We’ll give us five minutes.
We’ll find a paint.
We’ll come home.
We’ll be done.
[music] For 27 years, the three labs and the British Museum, which was the caretaker of all the material, for those 27 years, every request for access to the raw data was denied or ignored.
Yeah.
It’s 44 years later.
[laughter] There was no paint.
And it’s not a painting or an artwork.
He spent 46 years protecting evidence that nobody wanted to look at.
He died on June 21st, 2024.
And 9 months later, the DNA sealed what he always suspected but never lived to confirm.
Barry Schwarz was a Jewish photographer from Pittsburgh.
He wasn’t supposed to care about the Shroud of Turin.
He wasn’t supposed to spend four decades defending a Christian relic.
And he definitely wasn’t supposed to become the world’s foremost authority on a piece of cloth that mainstream science still officially calls a medieval forgery.
But the evidence made those choices for him.
And the evidence just got stronger.
In March 2026, a team of geneticists at the University of Padua published a study that should have been front page news across the world.
It wasn’t.
They had applied a technique called metagenomics.
The ability to sequence every strand of DNA on an object simultaneously.
Human, bacterial, plant, animal to dust particles collected from the shroud of Turin during that 1978 examination.
Samples that had been sitting in storage for 48 years.
Samples that Barry Schwarz personally watched being collected.
Nobody had the technology to read what those particles contained until now.
The DNA on the shroud doesn’t match medieval Europe.
The dominant human genetic signature HLO group H33 is found almost exclusively among the Drews, a community whose ancestors lived in the exact region where Jesus of Nazareth was buried.
And embedded in the fibers, the researchers found something nobody expected.
Haloilic archa salt loving microorganisms that only survive in extremely saline environments.
Environments like the Dead Sea.
The cloth that millions believe wrapped the body of Christ carries microscopic life forms from the saltiest body of water on Earth about 19 m from Jerusalem in the same landscape where first century Jews buried their dead.
But here’s what made the scientific community go quiet.
These findings don’t come from faith-based institutions or fringe researchers.
They come from the University of Padua published through bioarchchive the same preprint server used by Harvard, MIT and Oxford.
The lead researcher Dr.
Giani Barkatcha is a professor of genetics and genomics and the man who spent his entire adult life making sure this kind of evidence would survive long enough for someone to study it.
The man who built the world’s largest scientific archive on the shroud and never took a dollar of advertising money never saw this report.
Barry Schwarz died 9 months too early.
To understand what this 2026 DNA study actually means and why it’s quietly dismantling a conclusion the establishment has defended for 38 years, you need to know what Schwarz saw in that cathedral in Turin and why it haunted him until the day he died.
On findings being published in a new book out today on the Shroud of Turin, that’s the linen cloth believed to bear Jesus’s imprint as he was being prepared for burial.
And now there’s new research that may disprove the claim of people who’ve said it’s an elaborate fake.
In 1978, a team of 24 American scientists assembled what would become the only full scientific examination of the Shroud of Turin ever authorized by the Catholic Church.
The team was called STRP, the Shroud of Turin Research Project.
120 continuous hours, 5 days and nights inside the Cathedral of St.
John the Baptist in Turin, Italy.
They brought equipment from the Air Force Research Laboratory, Sandia Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
These were cold war era American scientists with security clearances, government contracts, and reputations to protect.
Their mission was simple.
Examine the cloth, determine how the image was formed, publish the results, move on.
And they invited a Jewish photographer from Pittsburgh to document everything.
Barry Schwarz was 32 years old, raised in an Orthodox Jewish family.
He worked [music] in aerospace and medical imaging, the kind of precision photography NASA trusted with sensitive projects.
When the invitation came, his first instinct was to decline.
Why would a team investigating the most important Christian relic in history want a Jew?
His colleague Don Lynn, a senior imaging scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who had worked on the Voyager and Galileo missions, gave him an answer.
Schwarz would repeat in interviews for the next four decades.
Jesus was Jewish, too.
Then Lynn told him to go to Turin, do the best professional work he could, and trust that the purpose would reveal itself.
Schwarz went expecting to find brush strokes within hours, a clever medieval painting, an expenses paid European trip followed by a quick debunking and a return to his real career.
He didn’t find brush strokes.
The image on the Shroud of Tin has no paint, no dye, no pigment, no photographic chemical, no scorch pattern, no ink, no artistic medium from any period in human history.
The STR team tested for every known method of image creation.
They found nothing that could explain how the image was formed.
[music] In their 1981 peer-reviewed report, Sturrup concluded that no combination of physical, chemical, biological, or medical circumstances could adequately account for the image.
The question of how it was produced, [music] they wrote, remained a mystery.
That conclusion was published over 40 years ago.
It has never been overturned by a single peer-reviewed replication.
If you’ve been following Stone and Bone, you know we covered the Shrouds forensic blood evidence in depth, the creatinin nano particles, the Billy Rubin chemistry, the trauma biochemistry.
If you haven’t seen that video, go watch it after this one.
What we’re covering today is what came next, the genetic evidence that arrived 48 years after those original samples were collected.
And if what we’ve uncovered so far pulls you in, subscribe to Stone and Bone.
We dig into the evidence that institutions would rather not discuss.
But the DNA story doesn’t start in 2026.
It starts with dust particles that sat in a storage drawer for nearly half a century.
And what those particles revealed about where this cloth has been is more specific and more uncomfortable than anyone expected.
So, while they dismiss the idea that the shroud is evidence of a miracle, they can’t explain how the image was made.
Here’s what most people don’t know about the Shroud of Turin.
The scientific evidence doesn’t come from dozens of independent investigations.
It comes from one set of samples collected during those 5 days in 1978 that have been analyzed, reanalyzed, and reanalyzed again.
As technology has improved over the decades, in 1978, molecular genetics barely existed.
The human genome project wouldn’t begin until 1990.
DNA sequencing was primitive, expensive, and slow.
When the STRP team vacuumed dust particles from the shroud surface and collected samples using specially designed sticky tape strips, they preserved biological material they couldn’t yet read.
For decades, those samples sat in storage.
Various researchers conducted limited analyses, but the technology wasn’t powerful enough.
Then came metagenomics.
Metagenomics doesn’t isolate individual DNA strands.
It sequences everything in a sample simultaneously.
Every fragment of human DNA, every bacterial genome, every plant cell, every fungal spore, every archal microorganism.
You don’t just learn who touched an object.
You learn where it has been, what environments it passed through, what ecosystems left their molecular fingerprints on its surface.
Scientists call it a genetic biography.
In 2015, Dr.
Giani Barkatcha and his team at the University of Padua published the first comprehensive DNA analysis of the shroud in scientific reports, a nature journal.
They sequenced human mitochondrial DNA and plant DNA extracted from the dust particles.
The results were not what anyone predicted.
The human DNA came from genetic lineages spanning North Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and Europe.
The genetic diversity was extraordinary, far more than you’d expect from a cloth kept in European cathedrals for six centuries.
But the most striking finding was the breakdown of proportions.
55.6% of the detectable human DNA traced to the Near East.
38.7% trace to India, less than 5.6% trace to Europe.
Stop and think about that for a moment.
The Shroud of Turin has been in Europe since at least 1354, first in France, then Italy.
It has been handled by French nobles, Italian clergy, and European restorers for over 600 years.
And yet, European DNA accounts for less than 6% of the human genetic material on the cloth.
Meanwhile, nearly 40% of the DNA comes from India.
The explanation isn’t mystical, it’s commercial.
The Latin name for the shroud is synindon.
Biblical scholar Leverne has argued that this term derives from Cind, the Indis Valley region of present-day Pakistan.
The Romans imported fine linen textiles from the Indian subcontinent through established trade networks.
If the shroud’s linen was manufactured in India and reached the Mediterranean through Roman era commercial roots, the high proportion of Indian DNA makes perfect historical sense.
It was woven into the fabric at the point of manufacturer.
And that raises a question.
The 1988 carbon dating was supposed to have closed permanently.
If the cloth was woven from Indian fibers and traded through ancient commercial networks that predated the medieval period by over a thousand years, then it cannot have been created by a medieval European forger.
Medieval forggers used locally available materials.
They didn’t import first century Indis Valley linen.
The 2015 study was published, cited, and discussed.
But the full power of those samples was still untapped.
The real bombshell would take another 11 years and a technology that didn’t exist yet.
And when it finally arrived in 2026, it brought evidence from a place nobody was looking.
In March 2026, Baraca’s team published their most powerful analysis yet.
This time, they deployed full metagenomic sequencing, not just human and plant DNA, but the complete biological inventory of the shroud surface.
Every microorganism, every fungal colony, every trace of animal life.
The study is titled DNA traces on the Shroud of Turin, Metagenomics of the 1978 official sample collection, published as a preprint on bioarchchive.
It is dedicated to the memory of Professor Pier Luigi Bimma Bologn, the forensic pathologist who first identified human AB type blood on the shroud in the 1980s and died before the paper was completed.
Let me be clear about something.
We’re only going to tell you what this study actually says, not what we wish it said, not what would make the best YouTube title, what the data shows.
You decide what it means.
Here’s what they found.
The human DNA confirmed previous results.
HLO group H1B common across Western Europe [music] expected given centuries of European handling.
But the study reconfirmed the presence of Haplo group H33.
H33 is rare globally.
It is found primarily in the Near East and it is particularly prevalent among the Drews, an ethnoreigious community that lives in restricted areas between Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine.
The Drews share common genetic ancestry with Jews and criates and have historically intermixed with other Levventine populations, including Palestinians and Syrians.
In plain language, the dominant non-European human DNA on the Shroud of Turin matches the population group that has lived in the region surrounding Jerusalem for thousands of years.
The same region where, according to every historical account, Christian, Jewish, Roman, a man named Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and buried around 30 to 33 CE.
Now, is that proof?
No.
Could Hapla group H33 DNA have been deposited on the shroud during some later handling event by someone from Levventine community?
Yes, theoretically.
The researchers themselves are careful.
They present the data without making theological claims.
But the DNA is a data point that no honest researcher can dismiss.
And it’s not the only one because the microbiome findings went somewhere nobody expected.
And this is the part that most videos on this topic either skip entirely or butcher with vague handwaving.
If you’re still here and you want the actual science, stay with me because what comes next is the evidence that changes the entire conversation.
To understand what the 2026 study found in the shroud’s microbiome, you need to understand one organism.
Halophilic archa.
These are not bacteria.
They’re not fungi.
They’re archa among the oldest and most extreme forms of life on Earth belonging to a separate domain entirely.
They thrive in environments of extreme salinity, not regular salt water, not ocean brine.
Environments so saturated with salt that virtually nothing else can survive.
Environments like the Dead Sea.
The Dead Sea sits at the lowest elevation on Earth’s surface, over 1,400 ft below sea level.
Its salinity is approximately 34% nearly 10 times saltier than the ocean.
It borders Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank, and it lies less than 19 mi east of Jerusalem.
You could walk it in a day.
In the first century, people did.
The 2026 metagenomic study found halophilic archa embedded in the shrouds fibers.
The researchers write, and I want to quote this carefully, that these organisms indicate conservation in a saline environment or storage under saline conditions.
They do not say the shroud was at the Dead Sea.
That’s not what scientists do.
They present data and let it speak.
But here’s what the data says to anyone who understands the geography and burial practices of first century Judea.
The Dead Sea region is surrounded by desert caves.
The same caves where the [music] Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 ancient Jewish manuscripts wrapped in linen and preserved by the exact environmental conditions that halophilic archa thrive in.
Extreme dryness, high salinity, stable temperature.
The Essen community at Kuman, which most scholars believe produced [music] the Dead Sea Scrolls, was located on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, less than 16 mi from Jerusalem.
First century Jews in this region used linen wrappings for burial.
The same kind of linen the shroud is made from.
If the shroud of Turin spent any significant period of time in this environment, whether stored, hidden, or transported through the region, the haloilic archa molecular fingerprint of that journey.
But the microbiome didn’t just point to the Dead Sea.
It told a story of centuries.
The study found bacteria commonly present on human skin cutie bacterium and stafylocus confirming intensive human handling over long periods.
They found fungi including dearomyces hanseni a species associated with hypers salailine environments and aged cheeses.
They found DNA from Mediterranean red coral, from livestock, chickens, cows, pigs, goats, sheep, rabbits, horses, [music] from domestic cats and dogs, from cultivated plants, wheat, corn, [music] carrots, peanuts, bananas.
Every one of these findings is a chapter in the shroud’s biography.
The red coral places it in the Mediterranean.
The livestock DNA places it among agricultural communities.
The cultivated plants trace a path from the ancient near east through medieval Europe.
The domestic animals suggest it was kept in inhabited spaces, homes, churches, monasteries not sealed in a sterile vault.
The shroud’s microbiome reads like a travel log spanning 2,000 years.
38.7% Indian DNA in the fibers.
Haplo group H 33 from the ancient Levant.
Halophilic archa from the Dead Sea region.
A biological record that traces a path from India through the ancient Holy Land to medieval Europe.
If your family has a Bible in the house, you already know the Dead Sea region, the land of Sodom and Gomorrah, the desert where John the Baptist preached, the wilderness where Jesus fasted for 40 days.
And now, the cloth believed to have wrapped his body carries microscopic life from that same landscape.
Drop that in the comments.
Did you know about the Dead Sea connection before this video?
But here’s the problem.
Every piece of evidence we’ve just walked through contradicts one specific conclusion.
A conclusion that the scientific establishment has defended since 1988.
And that’s where this story gets uncomfortable.
Not because the evidence is weak, but because the establishment test was in 1988, three laboratories, Oxford, Zurich, and the University of Arizona, conducted radioarbon dating on a single sample cut from one corner of the shroud.
Their conclusion, the cloth was created between 1260 and 1390 CE.
A medieval forgery.
Case closed.
The academic establishment accepted this verdict immediately.
Textbooks were updated.
Encyclopedias were revised.
The Shroud of Turin was declared a fake and mainstream science moved on.
To be fair, the skeptical position is not unreasonable.
Radiocarbon dating is a well-established technique.
The three labs were prestigious and a medieval date would explain why the shroud’s first documented appearance in history was in 1354 in Liry, France, fitting the carbon dating window perfectly.
Many serious scholars still hold this view.
That’s legitimate science.
But here’s what’s also legitimate science.
Retesting a conclusion when new evidence challenges it.
In 2019, Tristan Casabiana and colleagues published a paper in Archaeometry, one of the world’s most respected journals of archaeological dating, analyzing the raw data from the 1988 test.
What they found was statistically devastating.
The three labs didn’t get the same result.
The dates from the samples were statistically heterogeneous, meaning the corner of the shroud that was tested was not chemically uniform with the rest of the cloth.
The sample was contaminated, repaired, or otherwise compromised.
[music] The conclusion that the shroud was medieval rested on a test sample that didn’t accurately represent the main body of the cloth.
In 2022, Dr.
Liberado Dicaro and colleagues at the Italian National Research Council published a study using wide angle X-ray scattering wax, a completely different dating technology that measures the structural aging of cellulose fibers at the molecular level.
Their result, the linen was consistent with a cloth approximately 2,000 years old, first century, not medieval.
And now in 2026, Baraca’s metagenomic study adds another independent line of evidence.
The DNA and microbiome are consistent with a cloth that originated in or traveled through the ancient near east, carrying biological material from populations, environments, and trade routes that predate the medieval period by centuries.
Three separate disciplines, fiber physics, genetic analysis, and microbiology, all pointing in the same direction, all contradicting a single radiocarbon result from 1988 that was conducted on a sample now known to be statistically problematic.
This is not conspiracy.
This is exactly how science is supposed to work.
Testing conclusions, identifying flaws in methodology, and updating the record when new evidence demands it.
The 1988 result isn’t being suppressed.
It’s being challenged by better data.
And the challenge is coming from credentialed researchers publishing in peer-reviewed or pre-print scientific channels.
What makes this uncomfortable is the subject matter.
Because if the 1988 date falls, if the shroud is genuinely first century, then the next question is one that no laboratory can answer.
And that question is what drove one Jewish photographer to the edge of everything he believed.
Barry Schwarz saw the STRP evidence in 1978.
No paint, no dye, no forgery method.
Blood that tested positive for real human blood with biochemical signatures consistent with extreme physical trauma.
An image that no known technology could replicate.
And he still refused to believe the shroud was authentic for 18 years.
The reason was one specific detail.
The blood stains on the shroud appeared red.
And anyone with basic forensic knowledge knows that dried blood turns dark brown within hours of air exposure.
Red blood on an ancient cloth to Schwarz was proof that something was wrong.
It was the single thread his skepticism hung on.
The answer came from Dr.
Alan Adler, a pferin chemist at Western Connecticut State College and one of the most respected blood chemistry experts in the country.
Adler had been analyzing the stur blood samples for years and his findings explained the anomaly.
The blood contained extraordinarily high levels of bilerubin, a bile pigment produced when hemoglobin breaks down.
Normally the liver processes bilerubin and clears it from the bloodstream.
But when the body experiences extreme prolonged trauma, severe beating, sustained scourging, puncture wounds, hours of crucifixion, the liver becomes overwhelmed.
Billy Rubin accumulates at catastrophic levels.
Blood saturated with Billy Rubin stays red.
It doesn’t darken over time.
The biochemistry matched exactly what would be expected in the blood of someone who had been tortured for hours before dying through crucifixion.
The problem with the shroud’s blood was evidence for its authenticity.
The blood stayed red because of trauma chemistry, the very trauma the gospels describe.
Adler died in 2000.
His finding was independently supported in 2017 by Italian researchers who found creatinin nanop particles bound to iron oxide nano particles in the shrouds blood stains biochemical markers consistent with severe poly trauma and rabdtomyolysis.
For Schwarz the Billy Rubin explanation dissolved his last scientific objection after 18 years the chemistry answered the question his eyes couldn’t.
He never converted to Christianity.
He remained Jewish for the rest of his life.
But he later said something that followed him everywhere he spoke.
I was shocked to realize that God had been there all along, just waiting for me to turn around and notice.
And then he did something no one expected.
He didn’t write a book.
He didn’t start a ministry.
He didn’t monetize his conversion story.
He built a website.
And that website became the last line of defense for the Shroud’s scientific record.
In 1996, before Google was a household name, Barry Schwarz built Shroud.com from the ground up.
Over the next 28 years, it became the largest and most comprehensive scientific archive dedicated to Shroud research anywhere in the world.
Millions of visitors every year.
No advertising, no sponsorships, no corporate funding, no church backing.
Just raw scientific data, photographs, study results, chemical analyses, peer-reviewed papers freely available to anyone willing to examine the evidence honestly.
In 2009, he founded the Shroud of Turin Education and Research Association, Stera, as a nonprofit.
Its mission, preserve the evidence and make it accessible for future generations of researchers.
People asked him constantly in interviews, at conferences, in emails, why a Jewish man would dedicate his life to a Christian relic.
His answer never changed.
My job isn’t to tell people what to believe.
My responsibility is to make sure the scientific evidence survives.
If this video changed how you see the shroud or how you see what happens when one person decides to protect evidence, the world would rather forget.
Subscribe to Stone and Bone.
We follow the evidence, especially when it leads somewhere uncomfortable.
Schwarz was the last surviving member of the original Stur team who was still actively researching and presenting on the shroud.
He lectured on every continent.
He debated skeptics and believers with the same rigor.
He never overstated a claim.
He never invented evidence and he never stopped insisting that the science should speak for itself.
He died on June 21st, 2024 in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Survived by his son David, his daughter-in-law Marissa, and his two grandsons, Sullivan and Alistar.
Joe Marino, a longtime Shroud researcher, stepped in as editor of shroud.com to continue Barry’s work.
9 months after Schwarz died, Baracia’s 2026 study was published.
The metagenomics, the haplo group H33, the halophilic archa, the dead sea connection, the evidence.
Schwarz spent his entire adult life protecting evidence from samples he personally watched being collected in 1978.
Just produced its most powerful findings yet.
He never saw the report, but the archive he built made sure the data survived long enough for someone to read it.
And that brings us to the question that has survived every study, every debate, every carbon dating test and every institutional attempt to close the case.
There are two ways to look at the shroud of Turin in 2026.
You can accept the 1988 radioarbon dating a result based on a single corner sample now proven to be statistically heterogeneous and conclude that everything else is contamination, coincidence, or institutional bias.
Many serious scientists hold that position.
It’s not irrational and we are not here to tell you they’re wrong.
Or you can look at the accumulating evidence and ask whether the case is really closed.
A 2015 DNA study showing 55.6% Neareastern and 38.7% Indian genetic signatures on a cloth that has been in Europe for 670 years.
A 2019 statistical analysis proving the 1988 carbon sample was compromised.
A 2022 X-ray fiber dating placing the linen in the first century.
A 2026 metagenomic study finding levventine haplo groupoups and dead sea microorganisms embedded in the fibers.
Blood chemistry consistent with crucifixion trauma.
An image that no laboratory on Earth has been able to replicate.
We’re only telling you what the studies say.
The rest is yours.
Barry Schwarz understood that.
He spent 46 years making sure the evidence would outlive him.
He never converted.
He never claimed the shroud proved the resurrection.
He never asked anyone to believe.
He just made sure nobody could bury the data.
He once said, “The shroud is a test of faith, not a test of science.
There comes a point where the science stops and people have to decide for themselves.
The science hasn’t stopped.
Not yet.
And neither has the question.
If 46 years of evidence from a Jewish photographer, a team of Cold War scientists, and a 2026 DNA study all point to the same ancient cloth, and the only thing standing in the way is a 38-year-old carbon test on a sample that didn’t hold up to scrutiny, then maybe the question isn’t whether the shroud is real.
Maybe the question is why so many people need it not to be.
Let me know in the comments.
After everything you’ve just heard, do you think the Shroud of Turin is the real burial cloth?
Or do you think there’s an explanation we haven’t found yet?
I’m asking because this conversation matters and because Barry Schwarz would have wanted to hear your answer.
If this changed how you see the shroud or how you see what science is willing to question, subscribe to Stone and Bone.
We go where the evidence leads, even when it leads somewhere the textbooks haven’t caught up to yet.
Some evidence doesn’t need defenders.
It just needs to survive long enough for the right technology to read it.
This evidence survived and now it’s speaking.
