In 1947, a young shepherd threw a stone into a cave near the Dead Sea. He heard a jar break. Inside the caves, people later found hundreds of very old scrolls.

But most scrolls do not say when they were written. In 2025, a team taught an AI called Enoch to study the shapes of the letters. The AI guessed the ages of many scrolls. Many seem older than experts thought.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947, and eventually hundreds of manuscripts were found in eleven caves. However, most of them do not say when they were written. Experts have usually estimated their age by studying how letter shapes changed over time.

Another method is radiocarbon dating, which measures how much carbon-14 remains in the parchment. In the 1990s, this method placed the scrolls roughly between the third century BC and the first century AD. Recently, a team led by Popović in the Netherlands combined the two methods. They trained an AI model named Enoch on 24 dated samples. Enoch then estimated the dates of 135 undated scrolls, and many appeared older than experts had believed.

From 1947 on, eleven caves near the Dead Sea gave up scrolls that include biblical manuscripts far older than any known before. Most carry no date. Scholars have traditionally dated them by paleography, tracking slow changes in letter shapes. Radiocarbon dating offers an independent check by measuring the carbon-14 left in parchment, and tests in the 1990s placed the scrolls between the third century BC and the first century AD.

But each test destroys a small piece of a precious object, and castor oil and other substances applied during conservation in the 1950s can contaminate samples. A team led by Popović at the University of Groningen combined the two approaches. After cleaning and re-dating samples, they trained an AI model called Enoch on the angles and shapes of letters in 24 scrolls. That is not much training data, and a scribe who kept an older style of writing could make a scroll look older than it is.

Even so, Enoch predicted radiocarbon dates with an average error of about 30 years. It then estimated the ages of 135 undated manuscripts, and many came out older than paleographers had assumed. Experts judged about 79 percent of these estimates realistic.