It could be cited in a manner that more clearly signals "There are limits to what we know about them, but our limited knowledge includes this historic stuff."

It could be cited in a manner that more clearly signals "There are limits to what we know about them, but our limited knowledge includes this historic stuff." You know, if you listen to people on the internet from various cultural backgrounds, they routinely roll their eyes at how mainstream media presents them. I'm making the same sort of observation here: That it aggravates me the way we implicitly signal our assumed superiority to older/other cultures. That aggravation is not based on a single article. It's based on noticing patterns typically seen in such articles. It aggravates me in part because I think it harms our scientific understanding. I think you need context to properly understand things and we generally do a poor job of recognizing that we lack that context.