Boffins: We have found a way to unlock the MYSTERIES OF SHEEP from old parchments

Large samples....

You'd need a really large and comprehensive sample to piece pedigrees together..

Parchment was both locally produced, but also heavily traded across well.. the world. Many pieces of parchment were also recycled (scraped) , bound, rebound, cut up, etc. The stuff ended up all over the place, so you'd need to do quite a bit of sampling to get a comprehensive picture, and prevent tagging, say, italian sheep as a british breed.

Still, impressive work.

Kudos to Proc. Roy. Soc. for not hiding behind a paywall.

Bah.

Excuse me (clears throat) Baa-a-a-a-aaa.

Zzzz...

A great idea.

But am I the only one to feel that reading the family histories of sheep would have a similar effect to counting the sheep? Even the short paragraph about Swaledales and Scottish Blackface is venturing into the "more than you ever wanted to know about sheep" zone.

Holy Cow

This analysis will obviously be biassed towards breeds that produce good parchment.

Where you have breeds that are good eatin' but the parchment is crap, they won't be well-represented. Similarly where you have extensive use of barbed wire, you get (more) holes in the sheep, and therefore in the parchment, and it's useless.

(This is why they keep the cows for Bentley leather in fields without barbed wire...)

Otherwise a great idea - but they can't have my deeds.

Anthropodermic bibliopegy

Anthropodermic bibliopegy was the practice of binding the trial notes of a murder with the skin off the back of the murderer. So once they are bored with sheep, there is another weird source for research.

The Test of Time

After all, parchment was the writing material of choice for thousands of years, going back to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And it lasts thousands of years, not like modern paper which yellows in months, and degrades in a matter of years.

Full marks

for the excellent phrase "peeling a handy sheep"

Bah!

"Legal documents".

Would those be ancient Law Degree Certificates?

And for an encore

analyse the ink to determine the true history of squid.