Regarding the second one, variations of that, to help or protect strangers/travellers, seems to have been relatively common across a variety of historical cultures.

Tangentially, it also reminds me of a woman's grave that was found in Denmark I think. I can't remember how old the grave was, but something like 3-4000 years. They were able to use isotope analysis of her teeth, hair, stomach contents, etc. to trace her movements.

She was from the area, but in the last year of her life, she'd travelled down to around Switzerland and back. There was a documentary about it, I'll see if I can find it...

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Cordiali 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well... I'm not sure which bog body it was, there were a few!

It might've been the 'Haraldskær Woman', I found an article [1] about her which roughly matches my recollections, and is from around the same time I would've seen the documentary. Although she might've only travelled as far as central Germany.

[1]: https://journals.openedition.org/archeosciences/4407

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pfannkuchen 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Tangential, but I am always skeptical of these sorts of reconstructed stories when they rely on purely academic methods such as ancient stomach contents analysis and inferred historical geographic flora. Like, if that’s wrong somehow, how would you know, exactly? Both of those examples are fundamentally non-verifiable.

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Cordiali 20 hours ago | parent [-]

You can check if there's agreement between different techniques. Tooth enamel would be a pretty trustworthy source of information, for example. It just depends on what level of confidence you want in the results.

I'm personally comfortable with a "probable" or "it's likely that" in my history docos. I'm a lot less comfortable with that standard when it comes to planes, trains, and automobiles.

	▲	pfannkuchen 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That makes sense to me and I’m comfortable with redundant agreeing evidence as well (assuming we don’t ignore any contradictory evidence), but my impression is that these fields do not consistently have such a standard. Maybe my impression is wrong? To me it seems like you need to crawl through the dependency chain and verify that reasonable standards were used all the way up. Does the peer review process in these fields actually enforce this? It seems like no, but I am just a spectator.