Ancient Fingerprints In Saqqara And A Really Odd Thought

I'm watching this show - Unearthed - Hunt For The First Pyramid on Science channel. They found, in the tomb of what is a high official so they think, a fingerprint in the paintings on the wall. They are surmising that this fingerprint was most likely to be from a painter who had to be someone special to work with the paints. The paints were made from gems and were highly sought after so only those who were high up in the hierarchy had access to these.

That's the working story. I don't care if it's the truth or not but that fingerprint got me thinking about trying to find out who it was.

They didn't have genealogy.com back then and I doubt there is any dna in the fingerprint(then again?) but , and this is where the odd thought came in - maybe genealogy could be traced through the fingerprint itself.

Could there be a way to tell, from all the odd swirls, the family line of a person?

Has anyone ever thought about this? Anyone ever tried this approach?

I really need to get my foot better so I can get a job and go back into the real world. I watch too much stuff and have so much time to ponder and come up with stupid stuff like this.

Wouldn't it be crazy, if that print matched "Jack The Ripper"?

There may be an HBO series here...

actually yes this is inherent to our i d these days....be a hella program to cypher a swirl.....but we need to try

Actually, a finger print can be read to profile people sometimes. I read about that a while back, but the research was limited. I guess what determines the pattern has something to do with DNA.

I just checked again, and found this. www.scientificamerican.com... Seems like there has been more research done over the years.

originally posted by: TheSpanishArcher
I'm watching this show - Unearthed - Hunt For The First Pyramid on Science channel. They found, in the tomb of what is a high official so they think, a fingerprint in the paintings on the wall. They are surmising that this fingerprint was most likely to be from a painter who had to be someone special to work with the paints. The paints were made from gems and were highly sought after so only those who were high up in the hierarchy had access to these.

They rather misstated the case there. Most paint was made from pretty ordinary rock. It was only blue that required an unusual gemstone (lapis lazuli). And a high official would be important enough to use people from the king's workshops... so yes, they had access to the best.

That's the working story. I don't care if it's the truth or not but that fingerprint got me thinking about trying to find out who it was.

They didn't have genealogy.com back then and I doubt there is any dna in the fingerprint(then again?) but , and this is where the odd thought came in - maybe genealogy could be traced through the fingerprint itself. .

No.

Fingerprints are different on each finger of your hand... and there is not a genetic lineage of them.... as you can find out by fingerprinting your living family.

The solution will most likely use digital technology...

a reply to: japhrimu

ghr.nlm.nih.gov...

This link, in comon with others, suggests fingerprints are the result of "multiple genes".

So , we have to learn how to decode the fingerprint, just like we learned to decode DNA - which seemed a long way off untill we figured out how to do it.

So I guess the question is what is the pay-off of having to unique identifers? How could we use that knowledge?

Some problem to crack though!

What are you talking about, and why? Why do internet era humans attempt to rehash fruitless pasts and detest forward progression?