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.

▲

WalterBright 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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...

▲

card_zero 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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. Not sure what qualities an acoustic transmission line should have.

▲

WalterBright an hour ago | parent [-]

Make one out of gourds and see if it works.

If you have to yell in it, though, the other end can hear you 75 feet away just fine without it!

	▲	OJFord an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Why would it not? The string/twine is more the key to it really, are you thinking the gourd would be too dampening? They do say it's resin-coated. I'm not saying I buy that that's what this was made for or how it was used, but I do reckon you can make a functional 'telephone' of this style with gourds.