Photo credit: Jolanda Bos and Lonneke Beukenholdt

For those who have been using the same beat up yaki/remy/Brazillian virgin hair that has been passed down from your granny, to your mammy, to you: you can rest easy knowing that there is at least one woman rocking a weave that is older than yours. Pay no mind to the fact that she is a 3,300 year old corpse that was recently excavated from an ancient Egyptian settlement. Live Science reports:

She was not mummified, her body simply being wrapped in a mat. When archaeologists uncovered her remains they found she wore “a very complex coiffure with approximately 70 extensions fastened in different layers and heights on the head,” writes Jolanda Bos, an archaeologist working on the Amarna Project, in an article recently published in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology.

Researchers don’t know her name, age or occupation, but she is one of hundreds of people, including many others whose hairstyles are still intact, who were buried in a cemetery near an ancient city now called Amarna… Many of the other skulls Bos analyzed also had hair extensions. One skull had extensions made of gray and dark black hair suggesting multiple people donated their hair to create extensions.

Researchers also report that the women used fat in their hair as part of the styling process– the ancient Egyptian version of the brown gel.

Details of the woman’s life and death are still being investigated, but hair weave killah has not been ruled out as a cause of death. Archaeologists may never know for sure.

Source: livescience.com; nymagazine.com