Edit: full paper is freely available on Nature here:
The slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat."
That's rather more than circumstantial evidence. Granted the ritual might have changed a bit over 12,000 odd years but where else have you seen people poke sticks into tiny hearth's?
Circumstantial evidence is not “weak evidence”, it is evidence concerning the circumstances.
For instance, DNA is circumstantial evidence. It’s evidence that can imply a connection between events, but it is not proof of such a connection. Fingerprints: circumstantial. Call logs: often circumstantial.
The opposite of circumstantial evidence is direct evidence. Direct evidence is rarer and often not as useful. Direct evidence would be an actual witness to the event. To call back to prior examples:
Fingerprints are direct evidence someone touched something. But they are circumstantial evidence they then used that object in commission of a crime.
Here, the direct evidence is that things were burned and sticks were sharpened. The circumstances in which they were found implies the rest.
So, for instance, you could have a murder, and the prime suspect's fingerprints were found at the scene and on the murder weapon too. However, an eyewitness testifies that he saw the murder committed not by the prime suspect, but instead by furry space aliens who then departed in their UFO. We're supposed to believe the witness?
After all the knowledge we have now about how utterly unreliable and frankly worthless most human testimony is, you'd think our courts would stop treating it as worthy of a conviction.
If you get further away from historical records, it does get more tenuous, but there is often a solid basis of scientific or technical evidence. My own doctorate is in use of physics for dating by thermoluminescence and optically stimulated luminescence, which together cover a lot of ground for stuff that cannot be dated by C14. There are several quantitative techniques like that, for instance for isotopic analysis which can be used for deducing trade routes. There are also many qualitative and semi-quantitative techniques, varying from traditional trenches and ground penetrating radar to pollen analysis (which gives you information on climate and ground cover).
However all of this has to be tied together in to a picture of human culture. That necessarily has a large element of interpretation. This is not unique - you can see the same pattern in fields like astronomy. Generally I think archaeologists are reasonably good at knowing when they are on uncertain ground. If I may give an example: in Scotland, mainly on the north west coasts, there are the remains of pre-historic buildings called brochs. The biggest stands 40' high, and it is possible to walk up through the stairs between the double walls to the top. We know roughly when they were built, but not why. There are several theories, but I find it interesting that there is an absence of dogmatic assertion that one particular interpretation is true, and it is still possible to have a sensible discussion about a "fringe" theory (my own idea is that some of them may have been for excarnation) which will centre on what evidence you might need to search for (bone fragments in this case).
This sounds more like a birthday paradox. There are so many rituals and superstitions in indigenous peoples over the millennia that it would be shocking if you could never find cases of things that looked vaguely similar when reduced to an archaeological residue and you cast a net as wide as 'anything which anyone has ever described which sounds similar no matter how many millennia'.
(I would also note that 'fat smeared on stuff and involving fires' is not nearly as rare as it might sound. Fat is important and used in many sacrifices or medicines - eg Homer, with all that fat wrapped on or stacked on top of bones in a holocaust to the gods.)
Obviously not, because when these guys tripped over them, they were struck enough to then spend years looking for explanations.
> unlike the unknown but huge number that were not.
The more that are not documented, the more plausible it becomes that vaguely similar rituals which yield the same residue may exist in many times and places, and enter into the sum total of rituals available for birthday-paradox collision. Arguing that it must be the same with zero intervening evidence is like arguing that that because an Aboriginal word for dog is 'dog' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language#Word_for_%22...) both Mbararam and English must be descended from the same language which existed hundreds of thousands of years ago and have remarkably preserved one word for all that time. What are the odds?!
Birthday paradox? I guess it might originate from a similar but now extinct ritual, rather than the modern documented one. But given the near infinite number of potential rituals, it seems reasonable to suggest that because of the similarities it has been passed down over the 12,000 years. Even if the original ritual would be completely unrecognizable apart from the remaining similarities and performed by a different tribal group. Or maybe that is like claiming modern druidic rituals have been passed down for thousands of years.
In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions.
A claim of 12000 years needs strong evidence. Given what I've seen from the field lately I have a counter-theory, but I'm not really comfortable sharing.
Maybe you meant 1000 years?
If you really meant 100 years, there's an obvious counterexample: The "Happy Birthday Song", published in 1893. Arguably no one learns it by reading the words and notes from a page.
Furthermore, considering that until pretty recently in history most people were illiterate, the stories they learned were transmitted to them orally (even if read from a book).
The Happy Birthday Song isn't even the Happy Birthday Song! It's Good Morning To All! Happy Birthday lyrics didn't even make it into print until 1912 and that's not even the version that we use today. That version was first published in 1924 by Robert Coleman. The copyrighted version that even credited the Hill sisters with the melody (from Good Morning to All, in 1893) didn't come around till 1935.
As for peoples' literacy, yes, that's the point. That history is often unreliable. We even have disputes between early _written_ historians writing about the same events and have to compare them and also evaluate whether they were alive at the time of the events and what their sources were. Often we can discount what those people wrote today based on what we've learned from the past.
I said 100 years and I meant it. If you really think about it deeply, it should be obvious. Hell, I don't know who my father is and my own mother couldn't manage to stay consistent between tellings of that story...
You expect a complicated tradition to stay the same for 12000 years? I went to Catholic Church my whole childhood and I couldn't even tell you beat-for-beat what happens at mass if you put a gun to my head.
Of course I don't think oral traditions go unchanged for 12,000 years. Some very old oral traditions, like the ones from ancient India, stayed relatively unchanged only because their emphasis shifted suddenly and dramatically from active composition to ritual performance, to the extent that most people had no idea what the actual language used meant. Their opacity became a feature, not a bug.
However, despite the details changing, consistent storylines and story fragments exist across many ancient cultures, sometimes because they are derived from the same narrative source, and other times because of shared experiences across divergent cultures.
You could get fat on a stick by roasting a small mouse (so a small hearth), or tons of other ways. This really isn't enough evidence, not without a ton more findings of the same thing at various dates over the timeperiod.
Humans are a story based species...always have been always will be. Stories are our weak spot, the ultimate attack/control vector.
Stories (and LLM 'story models') can be fine tuned and A/B tested against humans with live neural monitoring to evaluate narrative effectiveness.
Donald Trump can tell a story (which is what all humans run on) adequate to motivate thousands of people up to no good to descend upon the nation's capital, do you think LLM's (science, etc) can compete in that specific arena/domain, at that level? (To be fair though, the Normies have been motivated to do more than a few silly things themselves by their trainers. Donald is good, but he ain't the best.)
There are readings of brain activity, and then there is brain activity that causes humans to do particular things with their bodies. One of these is more powerful than the other.
(Pardon for the vitriol, no offense intended.)
> FY2012 budget states a plan to “initiate investigations into the relationship between…neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, emotion-cognition interactions, and narrative structures.”
What has transpired since then is left as an exercise for the reader.