So if this freakishly does turn out to be the actual remains of John the Baptist1 then all of those Knights Templar who paid homage to John’s severed head were just kidding themselves?
Poor Templars.
I don’t buy any of it incidentally. You know as well as i that the Byzantines and Crusaders robbed graves incessantly, creating new relics. Very profitable. Sure, the bones are of Near Eastern origin
from the appropriate era. A lot of people lives and died in that time and place. Sometimes an appropriate grave was robbed through sheer circumstance.
It’ll be fun to see what mtDNA haplogroup this is though. “…a group most commonly found in the Near East.” Tell us more. The science here seems most precise.2