4 ms·

I think there is a systematic bias in our perception of ancient peoples that is influenced by the scarcity of archeological evidence, combined with a common log

I think there is a systematic bias in our perception of ancient peoples that is influenced by the scarcity of archeological evidence, combined with a common logical fallacy. Until we have evidence that people did X before year Y, we are biased towards assuming they did not. We continuously hear headlines of the form “discovery people did X before previously thought.” But why did we think they did not do those things earlier? The fallacy is to be over conservative and assume that if we have no evidence that something happened, it probably didn’t. But our prior assumption should be that the earliest evidence for X is much later than the first X.

aksss 4y ago
I think in my lifetime I’ve started to see the articles morphing a bit more towards “pushes back the date for the first evidence of people doing X”, which is a better spirit of discovery to express. This may be the result of choosing better magazines to read though, too. :)
AlotOfReading 4y ago
That is the prior assumption for archaeologists. For a long time, it was simply treated as "obvious" and there wasn't a well-established way to estimate temporal ranges from dated finds. Now people use a technique called Optimal Linear Estimation that was originally invented by paleontologists to estimate extinction dates.