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This is scientific American's 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagata.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are religious manuscripts.

They were written from the third century

B.C. to the first century C.E. They were discovered in the 1940s and 50s in caves along the shore of the

Dead Sea. And the parchments have been the topic of intense religious literary and historical debate

and they also continue to be the subject of scientific analysis including DNA.

The idea was to try to match and also piece apart fragments based on their genetic identity

namely based on the animals from which they were made.

Oded Rachavi is a molecular biologist at Tel Aviv University.

His team sequenced the DNA from bits of scroll dust.

Almost all the scrolls that we samples were perhaps surprisingly found to be made out of sheep skin.

We found two that were made out of cow skin and that's a big story.

Here, Ravi's colleague Noam Mizrahi from the University's Department of Biblical Studies picked up the story.

The scrolls he says came from a place called Kumron, a three days walk from the cultural center

of Jerusalem. Mizrahi explains that the people of Kumran were an extremist group with apocalyptic

predictions who harshly criticize the views of others.

Therefore, he says, there's been long-standing debate about how much the scrolls unearthed from this sect in

Cumron represented just this faction's views or more general Jewish thought at the time.

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