The real money quote from that article: "David Rawson, the US ambassador, said that its euphemisms were open to interpretation. The US, he said, believed in freedom of speech."
I noticed this too. People that casually drop "Bayesian priors" into conversation seems to be a strong signal for someone who's up their own arse. Sam Bankman-Fried did it a lot.
It was part and parcel of early D&D. In the OD&D and 1E days, the tournaments and tournament modules were all about finding and testing the best players, not the best player characters/builds. The tournament modules purported to do that in a systematic way, usually judging skill by how far you got in the scenario before dying. Gygax would often pontificate about player skill being the key to success in his tougher scenarios.
Have you ever read "Collapse" by Jared Diamond? Understanding and learning from that past is literally crucial to the continued existence of the human race. More crucial than any technology anyone here has ever created.
The book directly pulls on the kind of data on early societies that the scientists studying these caves produce.