Hi, Bip!
Here's some more detail on recent pollen evidences and speculations on the Shroud - posted on foxnews today:
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/10/ ... cmp=hplnws
I would add this:
IF it is an ancient fake - at least prior to 1300 - then HOW could anyone have accomplished it AND have also gotten all the right variables? NO methodology of the time could produce this. And even if some alchemist living during the middle ages DID implausibly have the ability, what would be his motivation for going through what it would take to do so? Given that easily faked relics would have more than sufficed to fool the gullible, especially in a pre-scientific age? So, even the earliest known reference to the Shroud shows that its age means the technology didn't exist to create such a marvel. And, that even if it had existed, someone going to the lengths that it would take to fool modern scientific analysis and laser scanning - well, WHY would they go to that level of trouble and effort???!!! That is laughable!
And, here's the other thing, even IF some rare individual utilizing some elaborately unknown technique would have gone to the extremes this would have taken, that means there was planning behind it, and likely, also it was commissioned. In other words, great planning, time and likely money were involved. So, some great fraud is plotted - against WHOM? What we know of the Shroud is very obscure. IF someone went to this trouble, you can bet it would have been trotted out to deceive on a level that certainly would have been known with some fanfare FAR before history reveals its existence. And yet, the early references to it are very subtle, certainly not flamboyant or hyperbolic - actually, quiet and humble.
The other thing I think is very powerful is that only a negative image of it produces the awe-inspiring positive. So why, WHY, pre-photography, would someone try to make such a thing? OH, almost forgot - it has three-dimensional spatial imagery. So, if you think this is a fake, you have to ask how and why, and by whom was it created, by whom was it financed, and why there's no early church or other record that would likely have been mentioned by someone, somewhere having produced some "relic" of such brilliance, breath-taking detail, having gone to such effort to do so.