As modern humans with constant access to every piece of information that has ever been known, we like to think we're pretty smart. Surely, in these times of carbon dating, digital reconstruction, and computerized archiving, we've learned everything there is to know about our primitive ancestors. Well, you might be surprised -- there are still several major events in history that today's scientists, after years of extensive research, know precisely dick about.

5 We Don't Know What the Ancient Egyptians Actually Looked Like

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Thanks to a pop culture obsession with ancient Egypt extending at least as far back in history as the early '90s (when Sam Beckett fought a mummy on that one episode of Quantum Leap), we know just about everything there is to know about the people of the ancient Nile. We've decoded their language, we know what gods they worshipped, we know the history of their whole civilization, and we pretty much know the first name of every ceremonially wrapped mummy we've ever torn out of a sarcophagus in the name of discovery.

The only thing we don't know is who they were.

That is, we have no idea what race they were, or what they actually looked like. Mummies of any screed tend to revert to a racially homogenous shade of dirt brown after a few thousand years baking in the desert heat.

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And it's hard to get a good look at them when they're chasing you and your talking dog through an abandoned mine and/or carnival.

Most people probably imagine the ancient Egyptians as being vaguely Middle Eastern in appearance, because that's how they're portrayed in the movies (you know, when they aren't being played by straight-up white dudes). However, that's just how they've looked since the Persian conquest of Egypt ... which was thousands of years after the people who actually built the pyramids died. Before that, it's anyone's guess.

You see, in the mid-1800s (when Egypt-mania really took off in the Western world), white people who marveled at these giant ancient constructs applied their strongest racist science and assumed the Egyptians were pasty Aryan Europeans, specifically because only white people could have the technical ability to build the pyramids. Others theorized that they were black, due to the fact that Egypt is, you know, in Africa.