We call it the Stone Age not because stone tools were the prominent fixture of their lives, but because the stone tools are the things that survive
Woah, is this common knowledge? I feel silly for not realizing that myself.
If you want something really fun...
It's becoming likely that around the time of the European contact with the Americas, there were large societies with high population densities living throughout what is now the Amazon rainforest. As parts of the jungle are cleared large geoglyphs are being discovered, along with apparent raised causeways between settlements in a number of Western basins. Furthermore, there appears to be artificial soil called Terra Preta all over along the rivers, full of charcoal and pottery fragments that collectively ameliorate the p...
One of the themes of current scientific progress is getting more and more information out of tiny amounts of data. Who'd have thought that we could learn so much of distant and recent biological history from DNA, and so much about distant planets, stars, galaxies, and the cosmos from tiny differences in very small amounts of light?
Pratchett's death puts an extra edge on the question-- to what extent can people be re-created from what they've left behind them, especially if they've written novels which include a lot of their personality?
Any thoughts about theoretical limits of how much can be figured out from small amounts of data?