Crisis in Psychology?

[The Grand Nudger]

It's interesting where a person puts the line between forensics, anthropology, and sociology. Leaving aside those things in the soft sciences which don't seem to fit the criteria for soft science, the only way to solve the reproducibility crisis with respect to living human beings is to apply benfords law - but there are obvious practical difficulties there - and we still have to acknowledge the fact that living people are inherently duplicitous. A thermometer expends no effort deluding itself, others, or enforcing a consensus of public opinion and Right Thought.

Here's a thought experiment. Early modern human remains are found, male, early 40's, signs of blunt force trauma to the skull and stone fragments between the ribs along the spine which have minor unhealed damage. Further, the effects of the deceased contain numerous manufactured items. Dried foods, medicinal herbs, binding material, resins, woven fiber, a number of flints and edges, woodcraft, bone awls and needles. A small flute. An axe, a bow, arrows in various states of manufacture from blank to finish. The mans teeth show signs consistent with being worn down by fine inorganic particles in lightly processed grain, but are relatively free of other damage, cavities, or infection. Other than the trauma listed above, the man is healthy and shows little evidence of a history of injury or persistent illness beyond having broken his arm once in childhood, and abnormal wear in the ball joints of his knees.

Forensically - the man was murdered. He has old injuries that have healed but none beyond (or at) the point at which he suffered blunt force trauma and, likely, several shots to the back. It doesn't appear to be a robbery, the mans items were left at the scene. If he died in a war, he was either very lucky or this was the first time he'd ever been in combat - both unlikely given his age. Given the items he carried, left at the scene, he was likely a courier or independent tradesman. The shots to the back were unlikely to have killed him, though the would have certainly incapacitated him. It's unclear whether this was an assault in the immediate sense, or whether he was harried and coursed - but either way, he didn't live long after those shots to the back, as the ribs and spine never scarred over. In the absence of any other remains or midden heaps or signs of civilization, we can only assume he was at some point between a and b when the worst day of his life happened. If he was with anyone, they either didn't die there or survived - but either way they also left his items at the scene.

So there's the scene. I'd have to write a novel (and novels have been written) to fully describe the anthropological ramifications of a find like that. We know that the man came from a community or civilization that could..for example, make or source all of those items. We can put boundaries on the route of the man or reach of his community by cataloging the items in his possession and their pre-historic extent-of-origin. We can determine the methods of production used to create the manufactured items, and how many man-hours they represent, by direct demonstration. Similarly, we can determine what and when people in his community or within his reach must have been doing by the same. If we find processed grains, we know what people were up to in spring summer and fall. We can see that he must have eaten a relatively alkaline diet by the state of his teeth. We can see that this period in time was relatively peaceful for this man by reference to the lack of repeat injury. However, we can see that people were also motivated to murder even then, and not..at least in this case, merely to acquire goods. He may have been executed, which engenders a whole hell of alot more than a mugging gone wrong. The again, again...they also played the flute.

All of this, is soft science, allegedly.