I was reminded of two things from the late 70s that a friend in cambridge did, and my cousin in london were doing at the start of their graduate research work.
The first was a study of medieval court records in East Anglia, trying to figure out what the demographcs were (in terms of single.married, how many times, how many kids, ages etc) - apparently for every day people in medieval tiems there were virtually no day-to-day records execpt that most people would at some point in their lives, show up in a court...so assuming most people didn't move about much in those day,s you could get a picture by looking at statistics and comparing villages/towns etc
Rhe second was a student of cave paintings from rather longer ago - the caves in France and Spain have depictions of animals from 17,000 to 22,000 years ago e.g. see
What my cousin was trying to do was figure out if the paintings were purely ritual, or perhaps actually a record of animals (especially ones hunted for food) - there's fossil records that give the spatial distribution of species, so you had ground truth - if the distribution of species in paintings was similar by area, then likely the primary record was of what people saw (even though of course it might also have ritual significance too) -
Neither study was conclusive, but then AI tools were very hard to use 45 years ago, especially for historians and anthropologists...
So maybe we've made some progress since then...!
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