i remember you saying you can tell alot from the nonce. if you mean lack of difficulty to imply that there was only 1 miner for the majority of 2009. well that wont work because "difficulty" was only implemented in version 0.2 on december 16th and the first jump happened december 30th 2009. so before december 16th many people could mine at the same rate without any speedbumps ...which many did.
Browse through Sergio's blog. He has lots of great details into Satoshi's mining.
https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/satoshi-s-fortune-a-more-accurate-figure/Really informative, cheers for the link, would be really cool if this guy was Satoshi and in revealing himself watching the effect it would have upon Bitcoin. Maybe he will be here with a savior solution for all this block size drama. One can hope

all that link shows is even at block 12 (2 hours after launch) satoshi wasn't alone.. yet the guy in the article still gave it a black dot..
also hal finney joins in at block 70+ so thats like 12 hours after launch.. making 3 people mining bitcoin on day one..
I know you need two computers networked together to mine, but I don't know if they both need to be mining, or if one can be a node and the other can mine by itself. Could the other miner at block 12 be Satoshi's second computer mining blocks? If he needed two computers to start the network isn't it probable that he used both of them to mine?