The sculpture was relatively safe for 40,000 years. I think we should study it, 3D scan it, replicate it, and put it back in the cave so it can stay safe for a few more Millenia. In a museum it may be bombed, burnt, or stolen, and that would be a shame.

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DoctorOetker 21 hours ago | parent [-]

How certain are we really that not the materials but the resulting figurine is authentic?

From Wikipedia on the Lion-man (English):

> It was not until archaeologist Joachim Hahn started an inventory and assembly of more than 200 fragments that a figurine with animal and human features began to emerge.[5]

We have seen countless examples before, from the Brontosaur skull mixup mess to the heavy-handed "restoration" of the Knossos Palace, including an essential made up King-Priest frieze from real fragments by Sir Arthur Evans.

For some reason the Wikipedia pages don't contain this information on Brontosaur or Evans' pages for example...

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jantuss 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Exactly, the reconstruction is subjective and can lead to damage. It is better to make copies of the parts and reconstruct those

	▲	DoctorOetker 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		you convinced me with this concise argument so the fragment-recombining future looks like robot archaeology: fragment collection done by careful robots documenting and keeping statistics on each grain of sand or potential fragment, those datasets will constantly be repuzzled with gradient descent and better and better loss functions, and humans go to the museum or dataset download page of reconstructed artifacts, or at least watch the funniest ones among an unlikely large cloud in likelihood space...