Decoding the Past: An Uncertainty-Aware Deep Learning Framework for Sex Attribution in Prehistoric Hand Stencils
This study addresses the uncertainty arising from missing ground truth and image degradation in sex determination of prehistoric hand stencils by proposing an end-to-end uncertainty-aware deep learning framework. By integrating ensemble learning, contour enhancement, and manifold mapping, the method explicitly models and propagates uncertainty throughout the analytical pipeline while employing explainable AI to verify anatomical consistency, thereby transforming uncertainty into a quantifiable component of archaeological inference. Achieving over 88% accuracy on modern samples, the framework effectively distinguishes between morphologically stable and ambiguous cases. Consequently, this work enables robust decoding, confidence quantification, and reproducible inference regarding sex attribution in prehistoric rock art, offering a rigorous computational approach to mitigating epistemic limitations in paleoanthropological research.