Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - The Pages Of Gospels Record Evolution Over 3,500 Years

DNA of the ancient virus was extracted from millennium old sheepskin Bible parchment, now in the collections of the University of Cambridge.

Credit: the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.

Hidden DNA in medieval gospels reveal history of deadly livestock virus - University College Dublin

Sometimes history leaves two very different records on the same page. One was deliberately written in ink by medieval scribes, copying stories that religious authorities declared to be sacred truth. The other was written unintentionally in molecules: fragments of viral DNA preserved in the animal skin on which those stories were written.

Unlike the supernatural claims in the text, this second record does not depend on faith, revelation or ecclesiastical authority. It can be extracted, sequenced and compared with DNA recovered from other archaeological specimens and from viruses circulating today. Ironically, manuscripts intended to preserve the Christian message have also preserved independently verifiable evidence of evolution.

As reported in Science Advances, an international research team led by scientists at University College Dublin has now recovered DNA from sheeppox virus (Capripoxvirus sheeppox) in medieval parchment manuscripts, including the approximately 1,000-year-old York Gospels, the earlier Corpus Glossary and other codices from Britain and continental Europe. Because parchment was manufactured from the skins of sheep, goats and cattle, each sheet can retain a molecular record of the animal from which it came—including traces of pathogens infecting it when it died. In several manuscripts, viral DNA occurred on several pages, suggesting that the skins of infected animals had been used in their manufacture.

The researchers combined these medieval sequences with sheeppox DNA recovered from Bronze Age sheep teeth found at pastoral settlements on the Eurasian steppe. The resulting genetic history shows that the virus has afflicted domesticated sheep for more than 3,700 years. Comparisons with modern viruses place the divergence of the principal capripoxvirus lineages—sheeppox virus, goatpox virus and lumpy skin disease virus—between approximately 11,500 and 3,700 years ago. This coincides broadly with livestock domestication and the movement of sheep across Eurasia.

This is not merely evidence that sheeppox existed in the past. The ancient and modern genomes form an evolutionary sequence from which researchers can reconstruct relationships, lineage divergence and changes in the viral genome. Although sheeppox appears to have remained comparatively stable during the past few millennia, the differences separating today’s capripoxviruses record an earlier history of mutation, descent and divergence. The evolutionary model is what enables those otherwise isolated fragments of DNA to be interpreted as parts of a coherent history.

The dates also extend beyond the chronology accepted by young-Earth creationists. Major viral lineages were already separating around the time humans were domesticating livestock—thousands of years before creationists claim that the entire Universe, Earth, humans, sheep and their viruses were created. There is no evidence here of suddenly created, immutable “kinds”, nor of every present-day pathogen emerging from an implausible burst of diversification following a global flood. There is instead the familiar evolutionary pattern of inherited variation, divergence and association with changing hosts and human activity.

Sheeppox^ A Disease Shaped by Domestication. Sheeppox is caused by sheeppox virus (SPPV), a member of the genus Capripoxvirus in the poxvirus family. Its nearest known relatives are goatpox virus and lumpy skin disease virus, which predominantly infect goats and cattle respectively. The three viruses possess large double-stranded DNA genomes of approximately 150,000 base pairs and share about 96–97 per cent of their DNA sequences.

This extensive similarity, together with their matching genome organisation and shared immunological properties, shows that the three viruses descended from a common capripoxvirus ancestor. They are related evolutionary branches, not separately created pathogens. According to the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, sheeppox and goatpox viruses contain 147 recognisable genes, all of which are also present in lumpy skin disease virus. The latter possesses another nine genes that have become extensively disrupted in the sheep- and goat-associated viruses.

When did the lineages separate?

Comparisons of ancient and modern viral genomes place the divergence of the principal capripoxvirus lineages somewhere between approximately 11,500 and 3,700 years ago. The broad range reflects the different evolutionary models and possible family-tree arrangements used in making the calculation; it should not be interpreted as the date of a single known outbreak.

The new analysis supports sheeppox virus as the first lineage to split from the common ancestor. Goatpox virus and lumpy skin disease virus subsequently diverged from one another. Some of the gene-inactivation events distinguishing these lineages were already present in the oldest sheeppox genomes, indicating that they occurred comparatively soon after the viruses separated.

Approximate date Evidence or evolutionary event

11,500–3,700 years ago Estimated divergence of the principal sheeppox, goatpox and lumpy skin disease virus lineages.

About 1700 BCE Earliest direct genetic evidence of sheeppox, recovered from sheep teeth at Bronze Age pastoral settlements on the Eurasian steppe.

Eighth century CE onwards Viral DNA preserved in European parchment records the presence of sheeppox during the medieval period.

Medieval period A genetically distinct European lineage circulated widely but apparently left no known modern descendants.

Present day Sheeppox remains endemic in parts of Africa and Asia and continues to cause serious livestock losses.

How domestication changed the virus’s environment

The estimated divergence period overlaps the domestication, selective breeding and large-scale movement of sheep, goats and cattle. This does not prove that domestication created the ancestral virus, nor does the discovery of Bronze Age viral DNA prove that the virus originated on the Eurasian steppe. The oldest specimen yet discovered records the minimum age of a pathogen, not necessarily its place or time of origin.

Domestication nevertheless transformed the opportunities available to livestock pathogens. Wild animals normally live in comparatively dispersed populations, whereas pastoralists assembled large numbers of susceptible animals, often with limited genetic diversity, and kept them in close contact. Seasonal migration, trade and the movement of breeding stock then transported both animals and their pathogens between communities.

Under these conditions, viral variants better able to infect and pass between particular livestock hosts would leave more descendants. Over many generations, mutation, selection, gene inactivation and possibly recombination could produce increasingly host-associated lineages. There was no foresight or intention involved: people unintentionally constructed an ecological environment in which an existing virus could diversify and prosper.

Evolution by losing genes

Evolution does not always require the acquisition of new genes. A gene can become unnecessary—or even disadvantageous—when an organism or virus adapts to a narrower environment. Mutations that disable such a gene may consequently persist.

Several genes that remain functional in lumpy skin disease virus are disrupted in sheeppox and goatpox viruses. Because these disruptions occur in the earliest recovered sheeppox genomes, they probably happened early in the history of the lineage and may have contributed to adaptation to sheep. The result is another example of evolution working by modifying, disabling and repurposing inherited genetic material rather than following a predetermined plan.

A slowly changing virus

Capripoxviruses have large double-stranded DNA genomes and generally accumulate substitutions more slowly than many RNA viruses. The ancient sequences indicate that the sheeppox genome has remained comparatively stable during the past few millennia. Its most important host-associated changes may therefore have occurred early, followed by long periods of relative genetic stability.

The discovery of an extinct medieval European lineage also shows that viral evolution is not a ladder leading inevitably towards modern forms. Viral populations branch, migrate, coexist and disappear, just as lineages of cellular organisms do. Further ancient genomes—particularly from goatpox and lumpy skin disease viruses—may eventually narrow the divergence dates and reveal more about the geographical and biological origin of their common ancestor.

Glossary

Capripoxvirus:

A genus of closely related poxviruses containing sheeppox virus, goatpox virus and lumpy skin disease virus.
Double-stranded DNA virus:

A virus whose hereditary material consists of two complementary strands of DNA.
Gene inactivation:

The disabling of a gene by mutation so that it no longer produces a functional product.
Host specialisation:

Evolutionary adaptation that makes a pathogen particularly effective at infecting one host species or a limited group of hosts.
Lineage:

A succession of organisms or viruses descended from a common ancestor.
Molecular clock:

A method that uses accumulated genetic differences, calibrated with dated samples or other evidence, to estimate when evolutionary lineages separated.
Recombination:

The formation of a genome containing genetic material derived from more than one ancestral viral strain.
Minimum age:

The youngest possible age of something established by direct evidence. Finding a 3,700-year-old virus proves that the virus is at least that old, not that it originated 3,700 years ago.

Sources: L’Hôte, L. et al. (2026), “Three thousand five hundred years of sheeppox virus evolution inferred from archaeological and codicological genomes”, Science Advances;
International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses: Genus Capripoxvirus.

Approximate date	Evidence or evolutionary event
11,500–3,700 years ago	Estimated divergence of the principal sheeppox, goatpox and lumpy skin disease virus lineages.
About 1700 BCE	Earliest direct genetic evidence of sheeppox, recovered from sheep teeth at Bronze Age pastoral settlements on the Eurasian steppe.
Eighth century CE onwards	Viral DNA preserved in European parchment records the presence of sheeppox during the medieval period.
Medieval period	A genetically distinct European lineage circulated widely but apparently left no known modern descendants.
Present day	Sheeppox remains endemic in parts of Africa and Asia and continues to cause serious livestock losses.

There is a darker irony too. Sheeppox is a highly contagious disease that can kill large numbers of animals, particularly lambs, while reducing the wool, meat and milk obtained from survivors. Its history became entwined with ours because domestication supplied the virus with concentrated, mobile populations of susceptible hosts. If creationists insist that such biological systems were deliberately designed, they must explain why a benevolent, intelligent designer devised a virus so well equipped to spread through flocks, kill young animals and impoverish the people dependent upon them.

Thus, on the very parchment carrying stories about divine creation and benevolent providence, nature preserved a different gospel: one written in viral DNA, recording thousands of years of evolution, disease and suffering. Of the two accounts on those pages, only one can be independently examined, tested and verified—and it is not the one written in ink.

The paper in Science Advances is accompanied by a news item from University College of Dublin:

Hidden DNA in medieval gospels reveal history of deadly livestock virus
Some of Europe’s most well-known historic manuscripts, including the York Gospels, have proven to be biological time capsules for uncovering the 3,500-year history of the sheeppox virus (SPPV).
By extracting DNA from the animal skins used to make the documents’ centuries-old parchment, an international team of geneticists, historians, virologists, protein chemists and conservators, led by University College Dublin have provided the first genetic evidence of how this devastating disease plagued European farmers’ herds long before the modern era.

A highly contagious disease, sheeppox spreads rapidly and can affect large portions of a flock in a short time.

The disease is particularly dangerous because it can cause very high mortality rates, especially in young animals, and dramatically reduces productivity by damaging wool, meat and milk yields.

The recording of ancient DNA of pathogens has completely changed our understanding of infectious disease in the past, and here we show that parchment can also preserve animal pathogen DNA. It is possible that archives and libraries around the world also contain the genetic traces of disease outbreaks in animals in the past. These genomes help us understand how these pathogens evolved and how they impacted past societies - such as sheeppox virus, which we show has been affecting Eurasian sheep herds for at least three and a half millennia.

Louis L’Hôte, lead author.
UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science
University College Dublin
Belfield, Ireland.

In a new study, published in Science Advances, reconstructing over 3,500 years of sheeppox virus evolution, researchers identified traces of the disease in medieval manuscripts, including several of significant historical importance.

Among the works analysed was the 1,000-year-old York Gospels, one of the finest illuminated manuscripts surviving from the early Anglo-Saxon period, and earlier manuscripts such as the Corpus Glossary of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, one of the earliest English dictionaries, and other medieval codices from across Britain and continental Europe.

In several cases, multiple pages from the same manuscript were found to contain sheeppox virus DNA, indicating that infected animals were used in their production.

Because the parchment used in the making of these documents was made from the hides of livestock like sheep, goats, and cattle it serves as a unique bio-archive, preserving the health of the animal at the time of its death centuries ago.

DNA recovered from the medieval manuscripts revealed that the sheep pox virus has been affecting livestock for thousands of years

Credit: the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.

One of the most unexpected findings from the new study was the detection of sheeppox virus on parchment made from calfskin and goatskin, suggesting either rare examples of cross-species infections or that there was contamination during the parchment-making process.

Parchment making has been considered a vanishing craft, but we are beginning to understand just how much of the past it has retained. This project shows that parchments not only preserve our cultural history for hundreds of years, but also the landscape of disease in our livestock in the medieval period. This kind of exciting, surprising discovery is only possible when researchers from a range of disciplines come together to share their expertise and data - a generosity and trust that collaborative science depends on.

Associate Professor Kevin G. Daly, supervising author.
UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science
University College Dublin
Belfield, Ireland.

By combining the study of manuscripts with even older samples from Bronze Age sheep teeth, the study reveals that Sheeppox has threatened livestock for over 3,700 years.

Unlike other skeletal material, teeth can preserve genetic evidence of infection over thousands of years, providing a valuable record of past outbreaks.

The research team identified the earliest known detections of sheeppox virus from dental remains recovered from ancient pastoralist settlements in the Eurasian steppe.

By comparing these ancient sequences with modern ones, they estimate that the major lineages of capripoxviruses (sheeppox virus, goatpox virus, and lumpy skin disease virus) diverged between 11,500 and 3,700 years ago.

This timeline aligns with the rise of animal domestication and the major translocation of sheep from the steppe into Europe.

Ireland is home to almost 4 million sheep, which are considered essential to the country’s rural economy and well-being
Credit: Giuseppe Milo

People around the world are still fighting against this pathogen - there is currently an outbreak of sheeppox in Greece, causing much economic damage. Ancient genomes can help us understand how these pathogens affecting us today evolved. We find that unlike the smallpox virus, the sheeppox virus genome was very stable over the last few millennia. This might mean that genetic changes before this point were very important to how the sheeppox virus evolved to infect its host, which may help us fight the pathogen in the future.

Louis L’Hôte.

Publication:
Louis L’Hôte et al.
Three thousand five hundred years of sheeppox virus evolution inferred from archaeological and codicological genomes. Sci. Adv. 12, eaeh3571 (2026). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeh3571

Abstract
Sheeppox virus (SPPV) is a major livestock pathogen causing economic hardship through reduced production and death of vulnerable sheep, with written descriptions of sheeppox-like disease recorded since antiquity. We report 21 novel ancient SPPV genomes spanning the Eurasian steppe Bronze Age (∼1700 BCE) to the Early Modern period in Western Europe, including multiple genomes obtained from medieval parchment. We estimate that major capripoxvirus lineages diverged ∼11,500 to 3700 years ago, overlapping known translocations and bio-cultural developments in sheep. Our dataset supports SPPV diverging first within the lineage leading to goatpox virus and lumpy skin disease virus, and that known gene inactivation events within SPPV and goatpox virus occur in our earliest SPPV genomes. These findings reveal that the food security of Eurasian communities has been threatened by sheeppox for more than 3700 years and provide insights into the genomic evolution and potential host adaptation of SPPV.

Fig. 1. Detection of ancient sheeppox virus genomes in Western Eurasia.
(A) Spatial distribution of all SPPV genomes reaching at least 0.1× of coverage analyzed in this study. Symbols indicate the source type of the SPPV genome, while colors denote archaeological or historical period. (B) Log10 scale of k-mer–based E value relative to log10 scale of the number of reads detected for SPPV by KrakenUniq. Red dashed lines indicate the thresholds used for downstream inclusion (E value ≥0.001 and read number ≥ 5). (C) Genomic coverage (log10 scale) of SPPV-identified samples with ≥0.1× mean genome coverage plotted against sample age (years BP). Colors correspond to host species, and shapes correspond to sample material, as in (A).

Fig. 2. Phylogenetic and dating analysis of ancient and modern sheeppox virus.
(A) Maximum likelihood phylogeny of ancient and modern SPPV genomes with ≥5× coverage, rooted using LSDV and GTPV. Nodes with bootstrap support of 100 are indicated by blue circles; other bootstrap values are shown at the corresponding nodes. Clades composed exclusively of modern genomes are collapsed and shown as triangles, and branches corresponding to ancient genomes are highlighted in pink. The gray box delineates the SPPV clade. (B) Maximum likelihood phylogeny of SPPV genomes with placement of low-coverage ancient samples using PathPhynder (44). For clarity, only the SPPV portion of the phylogeny is shown. Samples are colored by material type, and low-coverage genomes (<5×) placed using PathPhynder are indicated by red triangles. Nodes with bootstrap support of 100 are marked with blue circles; other values are shown at the corresponding nodes. Tip labels indicate sampling location and calibrated historical year of sampling or inferred ages; years are given as CE, with years before 1 CE given as negative values (i.e., 1000 BCE is −1000). Host species, sequencing coverage, and sample age are shown as a heatmap adjacent to the tips. (C) Time-calibrated Bayesian phylogeny of the SPPV clade, with samples colored according to material type.

Fig. 3. Timing the evolutionary divergence and gene inactivation events of Capripoxvirus. (A) Time-calibrated Bayesian phylogeny of capripoxviruses with LSDV rooting enforcement. Capripoxvirus samples are collapsed at their species TMRCA nodes (and noncollapsed tree is presented in fig. S18). (B) Time-calibrated Bayesian phylogeny of capripoxviruses with no rooting enforcement under the uncorrelated relaxed molecular-clock model. 95% HPD intervals of the capripoxvirus TMRCA for the uncorrelated relaxed molecular-clock model (blue) and the shrinkage-based random local clock model (green) are shown at the root. RPPs for the uncorrelated relaxed molecular-clock model are displayed at major species-level nodes. Tip labels are colored by viral species, and host silhouettes denote the primary host associated with each lineage. (C) Gene integrity matrix of genes that are inactivated at least once in the capripoxvirus lineage, using de novo assemblies for the ancient SPPV (two assemblies are excluded due to low quality, see Materials and Methods and table S11). Intact genes are represented in green, likely active in light green, inactivated in yellow, teal if not found in the assembly, and white if the sequence was excluded for the analysis. Columns correspond to viral genes and rows represent genomes included in the time-calibrated Bayesian phylogeny.

Louis L’Hôte et al.
Three thousand five hundred years of sheeppox virus evolution inferred from archaeological and codicological genomes. Sci. Adv. 12, eaeh3571 (2026). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeh3571

Copyright: © 2026 The authors.
Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

The ink on these manuscripts records what medieval men believed; the parchment beneath it records what was actually happening in the natural world. One consists of repeatedly copied claims about supernatural events, supported ultimately by tradition and authority. The other consists of physical evidence that can be extracted, sequenced, compared and tested independently by researchers who need share no religious belief.

That molecular record reveals neither separately created viral “kinds” nor organisms remaining unchanged since a creation week. It reveals common ancestry, branching lineages, gene inactivation, host specialisation and extinction. Sheeppox virus diverged from its capripoxvirus relatives as sheep, goats and cattle were being domesticated and transported across Eurasia, while a distinct medieval European lineage subsequently flourished and disappeared. The theory of evolution is not an optional embellishment to these findings: it is what makes the genetic evidence intelligible.

Nor does this history resemble the work of a benevolent designer. Human animal husbandry inadvertently provided the virus with dense populations of susceptible hosts and routes by which it could spread between flocks. Natural selection then favoured viral variants that reproduced and transmitted most successfully, regardless of the suffering they caused. The resulting disease killed vulnerable animals, damaged meat, milk and wool production and threatened communities whose survival depended upon their livestock.

Creationists who insist that viruses were intelligently designed must therefore attribute these capabilities to their designer. Evolution requires no such morally troubling invention. Mutation, inheritance, selection and changing ecological opportunities are sufficient to explain how a pathogen became adapted to exploiting domesticated sheep—without intention, foresight or concern for either its victims or their human owners.

There is a particularly satisfying irony in Christian manuscripts preserving this evidence. Their scribes intended the Gospels to transmit religious “truth” through the generations, yet the animal skins carried another testimony that no scribe knew was there. Centuries later, science can read both records. One tells us what people once asserted; the other tells us what nature actually did—and it is the unintended gospel written in DNA that supplies the independently verifiable evidence.

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