The red hair came from chemicals used to perserve the bodies over time.
And white people were hitting the
see they white!
“The hair color of mummies or buried bodies can change. Hair contains a mixture of black-brown-yellow eumelanin and red pheomelanin. Eumelanin is less chemically stable than pheomelanin and breaks down faster when oxidized. It is for this reason that Egyptian mummies have reddish hair. The color of hair changes faster under extreme conditions. It changes more slowly under dry oxidizing conditions (such as in burials in sand or in ice) than under wet reducing conditions (such as burials in wood or plaster coffins).”
Here’s a great article on the whitewashing of artifacts.
Whitewashing Ancient Statues: Whiteness, Racism And Color In The Ancient World
The Disturbing Resilience of Scientific Racism | Science | Smithsonian Magazine
I left archaeology nearly 13 years ago b:c it is hands down, the most racist academic discipline to date. I had a professor, now dead, who worked with colleagues at the Vatican. He said that racism was created by anthropologists in the mid 20th century to justify enslavement of indigenous people and b/c the “Dark Ages” was actually a bunch of Islamic Africans running shyt in Europe.
But never mind all that. The majority of historic African artifacts that point to unassailable greatness have been defaced, destroyed, locked in museums and the Vatican, or in private collections of rich white men who have their own secret order devoted to destroying evidence of African historic presence b/c it jeopardizes the image of Africans as savages.
They wiped paint and skin color off thousands of black artifacts or destroyed them out right. Professors would have viewing parties at their houses and shyt. Museums, curators, Egyptologists, anthropologists...it’s an entire academic organization devoted to maintaining a history of Eurocentrism.
Only students who professed such beliefs were allowed near artifacts. They keep a lot of that shyt under lock and key. And according to some professors who had their careers blacklisted, the government was involved too.
Anybody who even attempts to unravel the bullshyt gets labeled as a joke. Their work is discredited. They can’t publish in any peer reviewed journals.
Archaeology is the founder and historic preservationist of modern day racism.