"Each one was found in a separate fireplace around the size of the palm of a hand—far too small to have been used for heat or cooking meat.
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?
It’s all circumstantial evidence because that’s all we get.
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.
This sounds like something out of law school, where for some reason "direct evidence" is oddly treated as superior to "circumstantial evidence".
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.
It varies a lot. Later European archaeology is generally quite well-founded as it ties in to a historical record. While I don't have any familiarity with the Colosseum, I have heard that there are records of payments to sailors for manipulating the shades.
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).
If they had been doing the ritual regularly enough to preserve it for over 12,000 years in a relatively small range, it seems surprising that the excavations didn't turn up way more instances than it did. They can find 2 perfect instances within centuries of each other 12kya in the same excavation, then it just teleports without a trace to the 1880s?
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.)
Its a stick in the ground. People might have tripped over thousands of them, and millions lost to the elements and time. This find was only noticed because someone with the right specialized knowledge was looking in a specific location for artifacts, bothered to test the stick, and managed to link it to an obscure document written 150 years earlier, itself amazing that this particular ritual from this particular region was documented, unlike the unknown but huge number that were not. It is surprising we find this sort of thing at all. They might have cooked their lunch with a 35,000 year old stick without realizing it.
> People might have tripped over thousands of them
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?!
Its a stick they found in an area being actively examined, next to megafauna bones giving the age, that on inspection would have shown burn marks and probably not the megafauna lunch they thought it might be.
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.
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?