Spirituality and culture: Dating the Shroud of Turin?

An Australian friend, biologist Stephen E. Jones, has taken considerable interest in the Shroud of Turin, and has a proposal to date the pollen, which should be interesting. Briefly, no clear explanation seems to have emerged for how an image of a human figure, reputed to be Jesus, could have been produced on the cloth by a technique similar to photo negatives - in the fourteenth century. In any event, here are some other facts about the Shroud.

I have read a fair amount of material on the subject and seen several Shroud exhibits - and all I am going to say is this: If you have heard that there is some simple and obvious explanation for how the Shroud was produced, forget it. If the explanation were simple and obvious, it would have been thunk up by now.