Reply #40: It was a conversation about genetic drift.

[DarkTirade]

Someone was asking how long it takes for skin tones to change to environment, and I mentioned that I'd read somewhere that there had been some fair-skinned red-headed people in egypt at one point. But there aren't anymore. I.E., the genes that were best fit to that environment survived. And they weren't the fair-skinned people. :P Apparently a bunch of white supremecist websites tried to use that fact to claim that white people had a stake in all the cool things the egyptians did. And of course, since I DON'T frequent those sites, I had no idea that they were claiming that.

I'm guessing what happened was that this person only saw me mention redheads in that area, did a google search for 'redhead' and ancient egypt and only found the first few links to white supremacist websites. Obviously he didn't read my entire comment to get the gist of it, nor did he look past the first few entries in the web search. While it wasn't common, and of course, the later on in history you got the less common it was, there were documented redheads there. (most namely a few pharos since they were the best documented people of the time. There are also a lot of mummies with red hair, but don't let that fool ya... a few thousand years drying out will take some of the pigment out of hair.)

Unfortunately it was also a fairly obscure tidbit of information, so it was rather hard to find actual information about it on the web. Best I could find online to back up my claim was an little mention of it as a side note in an article about the god Set (who had red hair) on an egyptology website that mentioned a few documented redheads in that culture. The only one I can remember offhand is Pharoh Seti the First, who was named after Set because he also had red hair. :) I'd originally gotten that information from an egyptology book, but I can't exactly hold a book up to the screen and say, "Here! Look!"

I didn't bother to also point out that my jewish great-grandfather was born in Poland, and he only missed that whole WWII mess by a few decades. Or that his son, my grandfather (100% jewish descent, although his family had converted by that time and he was raised UU. Which would have been enough to get him sent to the camps had his family stayed in Poland.), served in WWII to fight against the nazis. Or that I'm part native american on the other side of my family. I just pointed to that one link to let my statement stand on its own merits, then hit the alert button. I really don't feel the need to justify myself to someone who is incapable of finishing a coherent train of thought, and is willing to accuse someone he doesn't even know of being in cahoots with neo-nazis. Even if that fact I'd quoted was wrong, I sure as hell didn't get it from some neo-nazi progaganda.