Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/17/scientists-find-mysterious-ice.html
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Paleolithic hoarders who had heard rumors of a mammoth bone shortage?
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See, a little pandemic ain’t all bad. /s
I’m guessing the Sabre Tooth Tiger hoarders didn’t get their bailout.
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All archaeologists: “Hey look at this ancient unknown thing we just found. I can’t identify it. Must be a religious thing.”
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That’s where all the meat went. As usual.
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“Oh Thog, living in caves cliché now. It so last epoch!”
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There is divide in the archaelogical community over the appropriateness of drawing that kind of conclusion, with skeptics trending toward younger scientists.
This may have come up in Cave of Lost Dreams (or something I read about Chauvet Cave). In response to an elaborate academic theory about cave paintings, younger scientists were refusing to get ahead of the evidence.
At least one said that the reason why artists favored certain animals may have had nothing to do with deeper symbolic meanings – they might have just been the animals they thought were the coolest to paint.
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“Come look at my large boner!”
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Also: “I can’t think of any way to build a roof over a structure that wide, so it must not have had a roof.”
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I read somewhere that Hunter Gatherer societies actually had a lot of free time on average. Maybe they just wanted to create something cool
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Ha, yeah. I know it’s a running joke in academia. If colleagues of mine bring in some weird thing to a meeting–something obviously modern–I like to say “what is that, religious icon?”
Cave paintings–and there’s also the theory that at least some of these paintings look like they do because they were practice, or painted by kids, and that lots of more realistic things didn’t survive.
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Previously, on BoingBoing
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Although it’s not clear why nomadic hunter-gatherers would have built such a permanent, labor-intensive structure
Tch! It’s a heffalump trap, of course!
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it must not be totally unprecidented. this display at the american museum of natural history depicts ice age man with a structure built of mammoth bones and skin. 
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To be fair, that depiction does look like it’s in an area devoid of trees, which was the initial assumption for this particular site. I took it that the discovery that there were loads(?) of trees contemporaneous with the bone structure is the ‘unprecedented’ aspect here.
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When a friend of mine was in college studying archaeology about fifty years ago a visiting lecturer held up a wooden artifact and said that it was obviously a religious object held by a priest or chief in a ceremony. My friend pulled a pretty much identical one out of his duffel bag and explained that it was an arrow-straightener.
The visiting lecturer was not happy.
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“Thog, after spending time gathering and fixing food I am sick and tired of finding it spread all over the place. You’d better figure out a way to keep the critters out, or go back to the ‘man cave’ with your friends.”
Thus, the fence was created. Mystery solved.
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At least they didn’t default to “I can’t think of any way to build a roof over a structure that wide, so it must have been aliens.” 
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And how wolves were domesticated. “All those bones, just look at it!”
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