Faith writes:
what you have for a starting point is something you KNOW happened in the past
Yes, we know a rape/murder happened in the past, but that is not what we are trying to falsify, that would be silly. We have a raped corpse, after all. What we
do not know in the example is whether or not suspect A commited the crime. We hypothesize that he did, perform a test using the available evidence, and find that our hypothesis is falsified.
To translate this to your example of the frozen mammoth: we know a mammoth died in the past, we just don't know
when. We can form a hypothesis about
that, perform a test and have it falsified, or not as the case may be. (Translating this back to the murder case: the test might confirm the suspect's guilt.)
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins