Old blood does not always degenerate to type AB, so the Shroud of Turin's and the Sudarium of Oviedo's AB blood group is significant!

I am reposting this excerpt from my "Shroud of Turin News for February 2012," because I have been asked a comment about the topic under my old, superseded post, "Re: Shroud blood ... types as AB ... aged blood always types as AB, so the significance of this ... is unclear." The commenter may not have been able to find, using a search engine, my update under the uninformative title of "Shroud of Turin News."

My comments are bold to distinguish them from the article.

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"King Tut's Dad's Toe Returns Home," Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery

[Right: Mummified remains of a toe of Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaton (c.1353-1336 BC): National Geographic]

News, April 15, 2010 ... A toe belonging to King Tutankhamun's father has been finally returned to Egypt, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said on Wednesday. The bone piece belonged to mummy KV55, which was identified as Akhenaton during a recent major genetic investigation into King Tut's family. The son of Amenhotep III and also the father of Tutankhamun, Akhenaton, (1353-1336 B.C.) is known as the "heretic" pharaoh who introduced a monotheistic religion by overthrowing the pantheon of the gods to worship the sun god Aton. The terminal phalanx of his great toe, probably from the left foot, was taken away in 1968, when the Department of Antiquities in Cairo, under the supervision of the then director, handed it over to the late Professor Ronald Harrison of Liverpool University. "Since then, the specimen has been held securely in my laboratory, but I decided it had to `go home,' particularly since very few people knew where it was," Robert Connolly senior lecturer in physical anthropology from the University of Liverpool's Department of Human Anatomy and Cell Biology, told Discovery News. Connolly, who authored several scientific papers with Harrison, used the specimen to determine the blood-group of KV55, then believed to be Smenkharel, an ancient Egyptian pharaoh of the late 18th Dynasty. "The remains appeared to be A2 with the antigens M and N present. This was identical to the blood group of Tutankhamun," Connolly said. ... I am posting this 2010 news item here on my Shroud news for February 2012, because of its importance, and it is the first I became aware of it. I was alerted by a commenter bippy123 to my blog post, "Re: Shroud blood ... types as AB ... aged blood always types as AB, so the significance of this ... is unclear" that King Tutankhamun's blood type was A2. The significance of this for the Shroud is that its blood type (and that of the Sudarium of Oviedo) is AB:

"The most striking thing about all the stains is that they coincide exactly with the face of the image on the Turin Shroud. The first fact that confirms the relationship between the two cloths is that the blood on each belongs to the same group, AB. If the blood or each cloth belonged to a different group, there would be no sense in pursuing the comparative investigation, and little meaning in any further points of coincidence. This test is the starting point for all the others, and the results are positive. Blood of the group AB is also very common in the Middle East and rare in Europe." (Guscin, M., "The Oviedo Cloth," Lutterworth Press: Cambridge UK, 1998, p.27).

But previously it had been stated that there was "a tendency among blood samples more than several centuries old always to test AB":

"In fact, quite independently of Drs Heller and Adler, other findings have served to confirm that what appears to be blood genuinely is blood. For instance the Italian pathologist Dr Pier Luigi Baima-Bollone, who has carried out thousands of autopsies, and who has had more Shroud `blood' sample than was accorded to Dr Adler, has not only confirmed it to be blood, but confidently identified it as of the AB group. [Baima-Bollone, P., Jorio, M. & Massaro, A.L., "Identification of the Group of the Traces of Human Blood on the Shroud," Shroud Spectrum International, Issue 6, March 1983, pp.3-6] Although this group is comparatively rare among Europeans and is found in only 3.2 per cent of the world's population as a whole, its incidence is 18 per cent among Jewish populations of the present-day Near East. [Garza-Valdès, L., "The DNA of God?," Doubleday: New York, 1999, p.39] Caution is needed, however, since some researchers have noted a tendency among blood samples more than several centuries old always to test AB." (Wilson, I. & Schwortz, B., "The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence," Michael O'Mara Books: London, 2000, p.77).

But clearly since Akhenaton's (and his family's) blood type has been determined to be A2, a variant of type A, which is different from type AB, and they lived ~1,500 years before Jesus, making them now thirty four centuries old, then there is good reason to believe (and it certainly cannot now be ruled out) that both the Shroud and the Sudarium's blood was originally type AB, which in turn increases the likelihood that the blood on them came from the same Jewish individual, namely Jesus Christ! As I responded to bippy123's comment:

"While not a scientific journal, I regard this Discovery News science news report as sufficiently authoritative, especially as it quoted Dr. Connolly's words: `The remains appeared to be A2 with the antigens M and N present,' to establish that old blood does not necessarily degrade to AB. Especially bearing in mind that at 14th century BC King Akhenaton's ... remains are much older than the Shroud's presumed 1st century AD. Which means both the Shroud's and the Sudarium of Oviedo's blood group being AB is significant and cannot just be set aside by the claim that old blood always degrades to type AB."

See also "Another Tutankhamen puzzle," Research Intelligence, University of Liverpool, Issue 24, May 2005 and "King Tut's Mom and Dad ID'ed," LiveScience, 16 February 2010. The lead paper in the major genetic investigation of Tutankhamun's family is: Hawass, Z., et al., "Ancestry and Pathology in King Tutankhamun's Family," JAMA, February 17, 2010, Vol. 303, No. 7, pp.638-647. I will get a copy of those papers in the investigation which mention the A2 blood group.

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Posted: 14 July 2012. Updated: 5 October 2021.