Actually, what you’re pointing out is one of the big flaws in a lot of the crap we see coming out of the institutional academy, these days. The assumption is, the academic is like a veterinarian, dealing with creatures lacking both agency and reason, so therefore… No possibility that any of them might know what the hell the answer is, or be able to provide the researcher any insight into why they made that choice in the first place.

One thing I’d have wanted to look at, were I curious about this issue, is the subject of “Well, what about at night…?”, because only a damn fool is out moving around during the daylight hours in the desert, during summer. As well, the other question is, what dye-stuff is available to the desert-dweller?

Sometimes, you have to wonder at the sheer hubristic self-centeredness of a lot of these people. They look at something like this, define it within the narrow parameters of their understanding of the lives of others, and then go from there, leaping from unjustified conjecture to unjustified conjecture, to reach a peak of unreason that flatly defies logic.

And, if they’d have just bothered to ask a Bedouin, they might have found a reason for the color choice, one that was quite far afield from their imagined reason of being solely due to the sun.

Hell, another reason might be contrast, so as to allow the Bedouin to be spot one another in the glare… Or, hide more effectively in shadow. Could be a lot of things, and not being a Bedouin who lives in the deep desert, I’d not be one to speculate without more of a basis of understanding.

One good point, too–Cultural traditions going back thousands of years generally have really good reasons for existing… Because, if they didn’t work, they’d have been abandoned–And, if they weren’t justified, they’d similarly have been abandoned. Find something of long standing, and you might want to consider just why it’s still hanging around, and whether or not you’re so damn smart for ignoring that.

Did it occur to the investigators to just ask? Cool science and all that, but…one does wonder what the response might have been.