[mandmandam]

That might seem plausible after reading just this article, but if you look at this video [0] you can see the way it was reconstructed, and hear it being played.

It strikes me as unnecessarily dismissive to insist that hyenas gnawed a perfect pentatonic flute; that really does just seem like some kind of weird jealousy... Especially when we have other examples of pentatonic bone flutes tens of thousands of years old.

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHy9FOblt7Y

[crazygringo]

It's not dismissive or jealousy at all -- it's wanting it to make sure this is based on actual evidence rather than wishful thinking, because that's how science works.

And when you see the image of the partial flute, it is entirely non-obvious that it's a musical instrument. It's a small piece of bone broken on both ends with two holes in it, and a hint of a third hole. There are lots of natural objects that look man-made but aren't, and canine species absolutely can produce similar-looking tooth puncture holes in the middle of bones. And when that happens enough, it's not hard to imagine 3 holes that could be used musically just through coincidence.

So it really does require a lot of analysis to show that this is actually a man-made instrument, and it's important to do that rather than just make unwarranted assumptions.

[mandmandam]

> It's a small piece of bone broken on both ends with two holes in it, and a hint of a third hole.

Did you watch the video? There are four holes, two complete and two very strongly hinted. Each in very precise positions, so as to make a flute that plays a large portion of modern rock music.

I don't have any problem with analysis being done, but the analysis makes no attempt to put such an absurd coincidence into perspective; neither mathematically, or historically.

It seems disingenuous, or at the very least strongly blinkered, to neglect to even mention the other flutes dated back tens of thousands of years, or the astronomical odds of a hyena biting a bone in such a way.

[Tao3300]

Whatever the doubtful counterpart to wishful thinking is, a great example would be conjuring up the perfect hyena to make the perfect bite without otherwise crushing the bone.

"Withering skepticism" maybe?

[crazygringo]

Take a look at the photos of known puncture holes in bones in the research paper in the root comment.

Lots of perfect holes without otherwise crushing the bone. You seem to be taking something ordinary and treating it as extraordinary (I don't know why you're inventing the requirement of a "perfect hyena", lots of hyena will do). I'll copy for you some of the intro text of the paper (emphasis mine):

> Ice Age spotted hyenas of Europe occupied mainly cave entrances as dens... but went deeper for scavenging into cave bear dens... In most of those dens, about 20% of adult to 80% of bear cub remains have large carnivore damage. Hyenas left bones in repeating similar tooth mark and crush damage stages, demonstrating a butchering/bone cracking strategy. The femora of subadult cave bears are intermediate in damage patterns, compared to the adult ones, which were fully crushed to pieces. Hyenas produced round–oval puncture marks in cub femora only by the bone-crushing premolar teeth of both upper and lower jaw. The punctures/tooth impact marks are often present on both sides of the shaft of cave bear cub femora and are simply a result of non-breakage of the slightly calcified shaft compacta. All stages of femur puncturing to crushing are demonstrated herein, especially on a large cave bear population from a German cave bear den.

Suddenly seems pretty plausible, no? Again, I'm not saying that's what happened, but that science does need to disprove that's what happened in a particular case. Just regular common-sense skepticism is all that's needed here. Unless you think all of science is "withering"?

[fugalfervor]

> Suddenly seems pretty plausible, no?

Very plausible, but incomplete to my eye.

The holes, absence of crushing, etc. are one thing. The placement of the holes is what gives this away as the craft of an intelligent being: those holes encode a pentatonic scale. This is a configuration which is totally unremarkable when discussing human artifacts (the scale is present in nearly every human culture) but which is pretty unlikely to occur as a result of a random process (a very small subset of the possible inputs, and of the exact right size).

It is possible that this is a random object, so i present two possibilities to you:

1. This is an object created by neanderthals, according to the above, or

2. This is a random object, but the recognition of the pattern of holes representing a pentatonic scale is selection bias. Other similar objects were discarded but this one was taken because the pattern felt 'familiar'.

I don't have a good answer to 2, but it seems less likely to me. I am assuming that any similar object with perfectly round holes would have been taken and analyzed.

[Tao3300]

> The research was sponsored by the Private Research Institute PaleoLogic which runs the ‘European Ice Age spotted hyena project’.

And they concluded that it was...

drumroll

a hyena!!

[teruakohatu]

It looks to be a reasonable article published in a reasonable journal not some crank or pay-to-play journal. More likely, a hyena expert saw the flute and thought "that looks exactly like a bone eaten by a hyena" and did some research.

Most archeology in my country is performed by private organizations. There is nothing suspicious about that.

I don't know who is right but a pile of badly made attempts at a flute would probably prove they were made by archaic humans, not a random hyena feast.

[crazygringo]

Right. Because they would probably be experts with the most knowledge to analyze that. And science is made of competing claims, with different researchers often presenting the best case for opposing arguments.

Do you think that the entire scientific process of collecting evidence on both sides of questions is a conspiracy or something?

[Tao3300]

You think I said that? Wow.

No, I just think experts in one specialty tend to have those goggles on for everything.

The funny part is that if Neanderthals were manufacturing flutes, I'd be willing to bet they figured it out by noticing some bones bit by animals had interesting resonances.

[fugalfervor]

The corruption of Big Hyena knows no bounds

[Tao3300]

Follow the trail of bit keyboards...

[piwi]

Geisenklösterle Flutes of the same age according to carbon 14 look like a flute.

Once you know that, it is a little bit more difficult to be excited about speculations on the Divje Babe flute.