[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.

[crazygringo]

Well I just couldn't figure out where your dismissal was coming from.

And I still can't -- we need experts to argue from their expert viewpoints. Everybody on earth has "goggles on". Which is why science is a group endeavor.

You seem to be immediately dismissing a scientific hypothesis by questioning motivation/objectivity, rather than actually engaging in good faith and being open to arguments. And that attitude is not a scientific one.

[fugalfervor]

The corruption of Big Hyena knows no bounds

[Tao3300]

Follow the trail of bit keyboards...