Of all the odd things one might associate with the Shroud of Turin, this has got to be one of the oddest, but Googling “Shroud,” “Turin,” and “Freshly killed seal” returns an extraordinary 17000 hits. Not “recently dead seal” or “newly harpooned seal,” but always “freshly killed.”
The use of exact phrases like this can help us track down the source, and the earliest I can find is from October 2000, where an Evolutionist refers to Creationist claims that “A freshly killed seal dated by C14 showed it had died 1300 years ago.”
There is a reference, which is to an investigation into the mummified seals which litter the Antarctic coastline, ‘Mummified Seals of Southern Victoria Land,’ by Wakefield Dort, Jr. in the Antarctic Journal of September-October 1971. Hundreds of carcasses have been found, ranging from “complete even to whiskers, the pelt soft and pliable” to “a few bare bones still articulated by remnants of ligaments.” Clearly some were recently dead, but how oldest the oldest might be, given the preserving qualities of the extreme cold and aridity of the environment, is not easy to assess. Radiocarbon dating would seem to be diagnostic, but “Antarctic sea water has significantly lower carbon-14 activity than that accepted as the world standard. Therefore, radiocarbon dating of marine organisms yields apparent ages that are older than true ages, but by an unknown and possibly variable amount. For example, the apparent radiocarbon age of the Lake Bonney seal known to have been dead no more than a few weeks was determined to be 615 ±100 years. A seal freshly killed at McMurdo had an apparent age of 1300 years.”
By 2015, the “unknown and possible variable” radiocarbon discrepancy in marine organisms was much better understood. In ‘Death age, Seasonality, Taphonomy and Colonization of Seal Carcasses from Ulu Peninsula, James Ross Island, Antarctic Peninsula,’ (Antarctic Science, Vol 28, No 1, 2016), Daniel Nyvlt et al. assess the ages of 11 seal remains, all but one of which returned apparent radiocarbon dates of around 1000 years ago, which were corrected using current standards to within the last hundred years. The exception was a single bone excavated from a glacial moraine, which had an apparent age of about 2000 years, and was therefore probably actually about 1000 years old.
The reason for the “freshly killed seal” appearing in sindonological literature is, of course, an attempt to discredit radiocarbon dating in general, which in fact it spectacularly fails to do. This is even more obvious in a claim similar to the seal, which is that “Living snails were carbon-14 dated at 2,300 and 27,000 years old.”
Why, sindonologists invariably fail to inquire, would anyone want to radiocarbon date a living snail? The answer is precisely to investigate the ‘marine reservoir effect,’ which was known about, if not wholly defined, as long ago as 1963, when M.L. Keith and G.M. Anderson published ‘Radiocarbon Dating: Fictitious Results with Mollusk Shells’ in Science (New Series, Vol. 141, No. 3581, 1963). Specimens were taken from the sea, a river and a lake, and came up with averages of 155, 1733 and 440 years “Before Present” respectively. The 2,300 year old snail was one of the river specimens. The paper discusses sources of ‘dead’ radiocarbon and the proportion each might play in the overall radiocarbon of these molluscs in each environment.
In 1984, A.C. Riggs wrote ‘Major Carbon-14 Deficiency in Modern Snail Shells from Southern Nevada Springs’ (Science, New Series, Vol. 224, No. 4644, 1984). In these particular environments,”Carbon-14 concentrations as low as 3.3 ±0.2 percent modern, measured in shells of the aquatic snail Melanoides tuberculatus (Muller) collected live from three springs in Nevada, are the lowest recorded.” Although no dates are given in the paper, such a low percentage does result in an apparent age of 27000 years, as given in the Creationist statement above.
Another anomaly often quoted by sindonologists is that of a mummified Egyptian ibis, whose wrappings, it is claimed, were much younger than the bird inside. This is really grasping at straws. The paper referred to is authored by Harry Gove, Steven Mattingly and Leon Garza-Valdez, whose involvement in the Shroud hardly makes them impartial observers (although there is no suggestion o any irregularity in their research), although Rosalie David of Manchester Museum who provided the mummy for research, is also listed as an author.
‘A Problematic Source of Organic Contamination of Linen’ was published in Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B, Vol 123, 1997, with the express intention of demonstrating that the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud was wrong. A mummified ibis was unwrapped, and samples taken from its collagen (2 samples, from bone and tissue), and its wrapping (2 samples, prepared in different ways). The results were (in years BP):
Bone Collagen: 2680 ±80
Tissue Collagen: 2570 ±50
Wrapping 1: 2255 ±75
Wrapping 2: 2200 ±55
The difference in apparent age between the ibis and its wrapping is about 500 years – in calendar terms about 800 and 300 BC. However, as the authors admit, there is minimal evidence for any ibis mummification practise before about 400 BC, which suggests that this one was actually hundreds of years younger than its apparent date. In that case, if “this particular ancient Egyptian Sacred Ibis (the species of ibis the ancient Egyptians mummified) was raised on a diet that contained some old carbon (depleted in 14C), such as food of marine origin or land snails, then this could resolve the discrepancy in the radiocarbon measurements between the ibis mummy and its mummy wrappings.”
John Jackson’s ludicrous Critical Summary of Observations, Data and Hypotheses regarding the Shroud of Turin (Shroud Centre of Colorado, 2017) includes three more attempts to discredit radiocarbon dating in general, and that of the Shroud in particular:
• Dating of one-year old leaves as 400 years old.
• Dating a mediaeval Viking horn to the year 2006.
• Dating wrappings of an Egyptian mummy a thousand years younger than the body they wrapped.
I can find no reference to the first claim.
The Viking horn was ‘found’ in Waukegan, Lake County, Illinois in 1952. It was a cow horn, and elaborately carved. When it came to public recognition it was first hoped to be evidence of early Scandinavian settlement, but it looked too modern, and was quickly realised to be a fake. According to his daughter it was carved by Hjálmar Lárusson, an Icelandic souvenir carver, with decorations and a poem, in runes, by himself. The full story up till then is told in Lögberg-Heimskringla, an Icelandic paper published in Winnipeg, on 13 February 1981 (see https://timarit.is/page/2234614#page/n0/mode/2up). Later in the 1980s the horn was radiocarbon dated by the Tucson laboratory and found to be from the 1920s, exactly as expected. In 1988, Nick Rufford, writing in the Times, said that Arizona had dated it to 2006, but that is statistically not credible.
The third claim derives from the unwrapping of Manchester Mummy 1770, during which the bone was dated to 1000BC and the wrapping to 380AD. Rather than gasp with surprise, the authors simply remark: “This implies that the mummy was wrapped or re-wrapped sometime after death.” It was, apparently, a sufficiently common practice hardly to be worth commenting on.
(K.C. Hodge and D.W.A. Newton, Radiocarbon Dating, from The Manchester Museum Mummy Project: Multidisciplinary Research on Ancient Egyptian Mummified Remains, edited by Rosalie David, 1979)
Mark Antonacci gives another list in his Resurrection of the Shroud. Those not covered above include:
• Dating 26000 year old mammoth fur as 5600 years old.
• Bone tools from caribou ribs at an Alaskan site dated approximately 27000 years old, yet a sample taken from the innermost portion of the bone dated to 1350 years.
The first seems to be a muddled together version of several famous Creationist claims, deriving from two or three scientific papers by archaeologists such as Troy L. Péwé (‘Quaternary Stratigraphic Nomenclature in Unglaciated Central Alaska,’ published as U. S. Department of the Interior Geological Survey Professional Paper 862, at https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/0862/report.pdf) and I. P. Tolmachoff (‘The Carcasses of the Mammoth and Rhinoceros Found in the Frozen Ground of Siberia,’ Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1929). I cannot find, and neither can Antonacci, any justification for his claim at all.
The caribou ribs are more interesting, and are explored in D.E. Nelson et al., ‘New Dates on Northern Yukon Artifacts: Holocene Not Upper Pleistocene’, Science, Vol. 232, No. 4751, May 1986. Four bones modified into tools by early humans were found among thousands of fossil bones scattered over the Old Crow River valley in Yukon, where they had been deposited after being slowly eroded out of a cliff. The tools appeared to date from around the same time as the other bones, suggesting that humans had crossed into America much earlier than had previously been supposed. That was in 1966. However in 1977, it was found that the mineral part of bone sometimes, and somewhat variably, exchanges carbon with its environment, and that reliable results from bone were best achieved using collagen extracted from its interior. Since that time, and bolstered by the fact that now, with the AMS method, much smaller samples can be dated, tiny fragments are drilled out of bone samples, all bones are tested in this way. When this was done to the tools, they were found to be much more recent than previously thought, and to fit the paleontological context already established for the area.
A much more sensible assessment of the dangers inherent in uncritical radiocarbon dating was written by archaeologist William Meacham in 1986 (‘Radiocarbon Measurement and the Age of the Turin Shroud: Possibilities and Uncertainties,’ from the Proceedings of the Symposium “Turin Shroud – Image of Christ?”, Hong Kong, March 1986, at https://www.shroud.com/meacham.htm. Meacham discusses the possibility of contamination at length, dismissing various people’s comments that it could largely be accounted for in a sample of the Shroud with some asperity. However, his examples are from buried samples, usually affected by “lignins from rootlets and humic acid from the soil. Dead carbon particulate matter may be deposited. Inorganic carbonates in even small amounts can also have a severe dilution effect on the specific activity of C-14, and may be occluded in the sample in some way whereby they are not completely removed by the acid pretreatment. Hydrocarbons may be deposited in a sample.” In all this he is no doubt correct, but such considerations must be a rather minor objection to the dating of a textile kept in a box for 2000 years.
Meacham goes on to quote erratic measurements in bone, shell, charcoal, wood, pottery, soil, peat and clay, which are hardly relevant, before admitting that “plant materials (wood, charcoal, textiles, grain etc.) are generally considered the best sample types for C-14,” although trees, which may live for centuries, can produce dates centuries apart, and plants growing in the region of volcanic eruption may absorb plutonic carbon, giving dates much older than they should.
Through paragraph after paragraph of gloomy foreboding, the Shroud sails serenely on. When Meacham finally gets to a discussion of textile contamination, it nearly all tends to make the date older, not younger, than it really is. That’s not to say that he does not make relevant comments. The Shroud certainly could be contaminated by “oils, wax, soap, paints, ointments, open wounds, saliva, sweat and smoke. Preservatives, starch and image-enhancers may also have been applied. Earlier, the cloth may have been sealed in a city wall for several centuries with a votive oil lamp, and the relic may have been attached to a wooden frame for additional centuries, absorbing decay products from the wood cellulose. Some of the penetrating organic substances may through time have degraded to low order residues not detectable as specific contaminants and shielded by the cellulose substrate.” All this is true, and Meacham is perfectly correct to say that, “a result of 300 or 700 or 1000 AD would create more controversy than it settled.”
Indeed it could have done; but it didn’t. It is significant that his previous sentence is “Undeniably, a “bullseye” result with mid-point at 20 or 1320 A.D. would lend strong support to the proponents or opponents of authenticity.” He was certainly true about that.
All in all, none of the foregoing cuts much ice. That leaves authenticists with the ‘usual suspects,’ invisible mending, carbon monoxide infiltration and neutron radiation, and a tiny residue of contamination not removed by the cleaning process. The first is too invisible to be credible, the second has been tested and found wanting, and the third requires a rather specific miracle, but the last may account for the chronological gradient uncovered from the radiocarbon results.
But all of them have been fully discussed elsewhere.