A screwy thing from the Paleolithic

My old pal Maju is indulging his fantasies, again, wanking furiously over some Paleolithic whatsit that some other romantic believes was a screw-threaded stopper for a water skin.

Looking at the drawing of this thing, the threads do look plausible, even if their shape seems odd for the alleged purpose. The width of the helical groove is nearly constant throughout, as is both the angle the groove makes relative to the long axis and the taper of the piece as a whole. It is indeed a remarkable piece of workmanship, especially at such an improbable date.

But the photograph of this artifact -- shown by Maju, but not by Don -- tells a much different story. Here we see that in reality the groove does not wind its way so smoothly and evenly at all. It is difficult to say how deep it is from the image but it is not nearly so wide as in the drawing. What once seemed a plausible example of a threaded plug does not seem so plausible at all. In fact, it looks like the groove on what I should take to be the grip, at the top of the piece in the photograph, seems far more precisely executed than the groove that supposedly does all the work!

I suppose it's possible that someday they will find an iceman melting out of a glacier, somewhere, with one of these things slung across his withered shoulder, just as Don and Maju imagine. On that blessed day I shall happily eat my words. In the mean time, I am guessing this might have been an Old Stone Age version of a tapered reamer, perhaps. Maybe they enlarged holes in hides with it?

¿Quién diablo sabe?

However much fun it might be to play these sorts of guessing games, it is difficult to see how they can be more than amusements, at best. They certainly are not science and do little if anything to advance our understanding. Worse, they encourage the substitution of plausible story telling for empiricism, a pernicious evil already rampant in too many quarters. When we should be looking at all the data and asking, what is this telling us? we instead argue over who tells the most plausible story. It is a waste of time and worse.

When history and anthropology may be so easily twisted to such nefarious socio-political ends, strict adherence to rigorous standards and sound methodologies becomes more than just good practice. Such standards become our moral obligation.