"DNA analysis is being used to study the Dead Sea scrolls written on goat skins and their possible owners.
How to fit the 50,000 fragments together? There are over 900 scrolls shredded to pieces. Which pieces fit with which?
This is where DNA analysis is helping out. The same techniques used to identify different humans are being used to identify individual goats. Since all but one of the scrolls are made of goat skin, and it is unlikely that a single goat would supply more than one scroll's worth of skin, researchers can analyze the DNA from each scroll fragment and determine which fragments belong to same scroll.
Another interesting application of DNA technology"
This bit concerned the ancient settlement of Qumran, located near the caves where the scrolls were found. Qumran is something of a mystery, itself, but archeologists think it was the home of a religious sect, called the "Essenes" and that they were the likely owners of the scrolls.
One of the combs looked suspiciously like the flea comb. It turns out that the comb had a similar purpose in ancient times and that some of these combs even contained ancient lice, trapped long ago in the tines of the comb.
Here's where DNA comes in. These long dead lice probably bit their human hosts and may have sucked up a bit of human blood. Naturally, researchers are trying to get a bit of this ancient blood, amplify any ancient DNA, and find out more about the people who lived in Qumran."