Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows

Given indigenous Australians favoured oral storytelling rather than written records a great many traditions and histories were lost during that time. While efforts by Europeans to catalogue and record traditions has occurred (as seen in this piece), only in the past few decades have many tribes/nations been able to properly explore and research their past.

A recent example I can cite, anecdotally, was an Aboriginal man who told me he was only able to learn his native language* because German missionaries has recorded it in the 1800s and released the records back to the people a century later.

* There's hundreds of indigenous dialects throughout Australia.

The modern person who sticks to a healthy lifestyle while still having modern medicine for emergencies and misfortunes will surely live better than just about anyone in the past, but, that person is not the actual average. The average person nowadays has their health dragged down by modern lifestyle problems so much, that I'm not sure if they're better off than someone in the past[1], even with modern medicine

[1]: Cherry picking a pretty recent past, though. For example, the obesity epidemic was way less in full swing in 1970, but we already had modern sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines by then, which eliminated the lions' share of illness. Once you go back before vaccines, it's a mixed bag. Still hard to say though, the diabetes epidemic is getting almost as bad as polio once was and trend lines keep pointing upwards.

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).