In general, we know that the Dead Sea Scrolls were written from around 200 BCE to 66-70 CE, per Smithsonian Magazine, when they were stashed to keep them safe. Beyond that, the process of reconstructing the scrolls’ some 25,000 fragments has proved a daunting, decades-long process. But if the Dead Sea Scrolls are composed of animal skins, then we can examine the animals’ DNA to learn a bit more about how, when, and where the scrolls were written. 

In 2020, National Geographic ran a story describing DNA analyses on 26 of the scrolls’ fragments. All but two of them were written on sheepskin. One of the non-sheepskin fragments, a piece of cow hide, belonged to a version of the Book of Jeremiah that researchers had previously wrongfully connected to a different manuscript. This is extremely telling, as Noam Mizrahi, biblical scholar at Tel Aviv University says, because it means that the different versions of Jeremiah originated in different regions.

Researchers were even able to distinguish between not only different species, but different flocks of sheep. They connected sheep RNA to stylistic differences between texts, indicating that shepherds and associated Jewish communities were responsible for particular manuscripts. The Jews at Qumran — a somewhat fringe, monastic group — consolidated various manuscripts, we assume, for whatever reason; perhaps archival. In turn, this helps shed light on the validity of not only the Dead Sea Scrolls as a whole, but each individual text.