Scanning Electron Microscope Studies of the Biodeterioration of Human Hair Buried in Soil and Immersed in Water

Selective biodegradation in hair shafts derived from archaeological, forensic and experimental contexts

“…Much of the literature has been concerned with destruction of keratinaceous structures at the expense of melanin pigment survival 25,26 . Yet we demonstrate here that the most extreme example of this differential breakdown of hair structural components involves the preferential survival of melanin pigment granules embedded between microbial structures to form ‘ghost fibres’.…”

“…There have been some limited attempts to understand the process of hair fibre degradation over forensic timescales, but much of this has been restricted to gross observations, usually at the fibre surface 25–31 . Fungal tunnelling, first recognized as a feature of bone degradation, 24 has also been described for hair recovered from forensic casework, 32 where the ends of degraded hair fibre are more severely degraded than the mid‐shaft region 33…”