139: Melanin and the mummies

This article is about the possibility that what we will find in our cave are skeletons with intact hair (as has been suggested) and that it is red. We aren't saying that will be the case, but others have. We aren't interested in anything but what they are.

But in that topic, red haired and blonde haired mummies are found all over the world. One of the Otago Musuem curators was questioned about red haired dried Maori heads that used to be exhibited in the 1960’s. He stated that all black hair turned red eventually due to the loss of melanin and this is a standard process of death. If that is true let's first look at some Maori preserved heads, some of which belong to the Otago Museum...

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Ok. So that seems to suggest the curator is incorrect. If preserved heads all turned red after death, why are there more black ones than read ones? So just to see what happens elsewhere, lets look at true mummification processes, firstly in Egypt...

The comment about the blue eyes is a fair one, but many ignore that. Many pharaohs are depicted with blue eyes. But in regard to red hair, many researches are now saying it was due to henna being used in hair and this may be true in many cases.

So what about the Peruvian mummies? Most are red as so this could be construed as meaning the hair colour does change over time. Yet the below shows a 500 year old mummy with black hair. Both Egypt and Peru are inconclusive enough to support the theory that red haired people lived among them in enough quantity to be 90% of the mummies.

550 year old Peruvian mummy with dark hair

However, the Maori preserved heads are the enigma, as they have various quantities of black and red hair from the same process of drying and same time frames at a period in history when legends talk of red haired people living here before them. I'll repeat that one again. The dried heads were a mix of red and black hair from a time frame in history of within 200 years.

Inconclusive? Probably, but who can explain the first 6 photos of this post? As you can see the same process did not create the same hair colour result. This type of statement from certain museum staff and archaeologists is what makes many believe they lie, or are just plain misleading, covering up something, or maybe even stated in ignorance. What is even more interesting is many people over the age of 50 remember seeing both black and red haired preserved Maori heads at the Otago Musuem and elsewhere. They saw them plainly and remember exactly what they saw. So I guess that would be hard to suggest they do not exist or the colour range.

European explorers in their first contacts with various indigenous peoples around the world, saw the same differences within the same races and tribes. Cook mentions seeing fair haired Maori - yet he was the first here apparently! Others saw them in the interior of NZ. Note that this is long before Europeans were ever in those areas (unless red haired survivors of shipwrecks were not killed and eaten and were absorbed into local populations with enough time to distribute that gene). William Colenso also mentions red hair. Even our own government documents of Maori history mention our own Maori legends of red haired people - all here before Polynesians arrived.

Now lets look at some modern research in regard to red hair and burial age:

Fag el-Gamous is an enormous cemetery in Egypt containing over 1,000,000 burials of ordinary citizens that were naturally mummified by the hot and dry desert sands over 1,500 years ago. According to Dr. Janet Davey from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine in Australia, some ancient Egyptians were naturally blonde or red haired. That means most were not. Her research has brought an article published recently by The Sydney Morning Herald says that the mystery of the red and blonde hair discovered on some ancient Egyptian mummies may finally be solved. The new research was necessary to check the common perception that no ancient Egyptians had hair that 'wasn’t' colored dark brown or black. Until now, most researchers had claimed that the different colors of the mummy hair were a result of the mummification process and death itself. She is convinced that there were fair-haired Egyptians, but that they are just very rare. She also suggests that there were blondes living in Egypt between 332 BC - 395 AD. What is more intriguing is that there are unique groupings of burials clustered according to hair color, including blond and redheaded mummies. Maybe they were family groups or genetic groups. No one knows for sure.

Having covered all that I don't care if the skulls of the skeletons we seek have black hair, red hair, blonde hair or no hair, but I would prefer them to not have red hair so archaeologists have to come up with another theory that all dead have their hair change to red over time. Essentially it is the bones, skull shape, femoral entry point, DNA and carbon dating (as a combined group of identifiers) that is more relevant - in other words, the overall picture. And learning what we have about the genetic mix coming from Melanesia before Papuans moved across and into Polynesia, the mix should be interesting.

But above all, no one will have an answer to the height, (if they are all 8' as it has been suggested). And if you've followed us this year you already know we have some conclusive proof an ancient 'tall race' did in fact exist in the area of south Waikato.