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Comment by card_zero

3 hours ago

Ever tried carving a regular pattern, such as XXXXXXX, in a piece of wood? The blade keeps getting stuck on the wrong course, the angle deviates from vertical, you have to retry strokes and they don't land in the same place the second time. If the work piece is small your accuracy goes down. In this case they're carving bone, which may be easier, but the tool is a tiny piece of flint held between fingers.

So then instead of XXXXXXX the researchers record X/\XXV/X. Let's run that through some mystifying statistical software and tell the world about its information content! Or "complexity", which might not be information.

Come to think of it, an example of misunderstood artifacts from this period, the Aurignacian, is the "perforated baton", formerly proposed to be held at meetings for the right to speak, now found out to be a spear shaft straightener.

I remember the two gourds connected by a 75 foot string was interpreted as a "telephone". Apparently nobody has tried it out, and there's no mention of anyone trying to make one with a modern gourd.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/there...

  • Huh, but that's totally a tin can telephone. Would be a fun project for an experimental archeologist. The cans - I mean gourds - have little drumskin membranes stretched over them! The twine looks like the only dubious part, too stretchy maybe.