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Woke activists make ‘absurd’ demand archeologists stop assigning genders, race to skeletal remains

July 24, 2022 | | Print Article

If you’ve ever heard a liberal insist that Cleopatra was black (spoiler: she was Greek), you can appreciate the lunacy of the latest demands from woke activists who want actual scientists to stop assuming the genders of ancient skeletal remains and documenting their races because there’s no way to know how a dead Sumerian may have self-identified in life, and factually recording their race only  “contributes to white supremacy.”

No, this isn’t a Saturday Night Live skit. This is actually a deeply disturbing thing, the Daily Mail reported.

More and more ancient skeletons are being designated as “non-binary” or “gender-neutral” by virtue-signaling academics in a trend that critics rightly say will result in the rewriting of history and impose an anachronistic ideology on cultures that likely never worried about which pronouns to use.

“It is an absurd proposition, as the difference between genders, just as the difference between religious, social, and national groups, are key motors in history,” said Jeremy Black, emeritus professor of history at the University of Exeter in South West England.

“This very ideological approach to knowledge means that we’re in danger of making knowledge itself simply a matter of political preference,” Black added.

Among the wave of trendy academics is the Black Trowel Collective, an American group of “anarchist archaeologists” who claim that “archaeologists must center the fluidity of gender in their archaeological practice.”

In its manifesto on “trans liberation,” the group argues, “It is clear from archaeological, historical, and ethnographic accounts that human gender is highly variable and that human beings have historically been comfortable with a range of genders beyond modern ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ binaries.”

According to a U.S. study released this year, classifying remains by race is “dangerous,” because “ancestry estimation contributes to white supremacy” and “might actually hinder identification efforts because of entrenched racial biases.”

As an example of just how “scientific” uber-progressive academics are getting, the Daily Mail points to European researchers, who last year concluded in Finland that a 1,000-year-old skeleton was that of a non-binary person because feminine jewelry and an obviously masculine sword were found with the bones.

Historical fact, says Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, is the latest “frontier” for those who would push radical gender ideology.

“If you look at history, one of the foundations of civilization is the distinction between man and woman,” he said, “whether it be in the Bible or yin and yang in Chinese philosophy, so when you distort that, you get a completely different version of what has happened.”

“Should this dangerous dogma be accepted,” Furedi warned, “it means that when children learn about Greek, Roman, or other ancient civilizations they get a falsified picture.”

“You have to fight back against this,” he stressed, “because if it is accepted, then the whole academic enterprise turns into an empty pursuit of ideological objectives.”

Melissa Fine
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