5,000 year-old stone balls continue to baffle archaeologists

http://www.foxnews.com ^ | 6/18/18 | Tom Metcalfe

[Right Wing Assault]

I wonder how many different people made these. The quality is all over the place.

One of them on the 3-D website looks like a grenade. Another, a round meat tenderizer.

They like 4 and 6 knobs - tetrahedron and cube based. Platonic solid based. There’s a reference to these under “History”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid

It would be fun if some genius had made ones based on the Dodecahedron or Icosahedron.

[Red Badger]

https://www.nms.ac.uk/towieball

[SunkenCiv]

They also carved their bats out of stone. Thanks BBell.

[Red Badger]

[Still Thinking]

Four balls???? STRUT, MFer, strut!

[sodpoodle]

Superstitious people spend time and effort on creating items to appease or intimidate.

Mid-century armaments are covered in them.

[Pearls Before Swine]

Maybe these stones are models of molecular orbitals handed down from the long-lost physics tradition of Atlantis.

Maybe not.

[CaptainPhilFan]

The Nut Bra, for holding your balls.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zdDfQrPi5Q

[Grimmy]

Maybe they were a form of finals exam for stone age students?

[publius911]

5,000 year-old stone balls continue to baffle archaeologists

This rings a bell.

I'm sure that if you check out Mel Brooks' 2000-year old man routine, there should be something in there about stone balls...

[Jamestown1630]

Could be. The wiki indicates that they aren’t found in graves, which suggests that they weren’t personal items. But the context in which most were found appears to be lost, so they could have been in graves...

[Jamestown1630]

I wondered if they were some way of teaching math and geometry.

[BBell]

That will leave a mark.

[Red Badger]

I think they were ‘seals’ identifying the sender of a message or on a legal document. They may have been ‘deeds’ that show the owner of the land was given by the king................

[GOPJ]

Stone workers calling cards... “yes, this is the quality of work I do”...

[publius911]

This is old news, and not unique.
Here is a book, originally written in 1993(?), which is replete with many examples of similar puzzlers.

The "Forbidden" part refers to the fact that mainstream Archeologists do not allow themselves to talk about it in any way...

Forbidden Archeology

[Teflonic]

Wrap some rope around one and sling it and the archaeologist who gets hit with it will realize real quick what they were used for.

That's my first thought as well, rope or sinew. Those binding grooves make their use completely obvious to anyone with common sense - especially when you consider that weapons in every society in history have always been the most technologically advanced objects produced at the time.

[Vermont Lt]

That’s what I thought right away. The little bumps would work with an “open” sling.

And baseball sized rocks leave a mark. I have one ( a mark from a rock fight) on my left temple. (I learned a lesson about why it’s good to have the high ground in a rock fight.)

[Jamestown1630]

Well, there has been plenty of “talk” about these balls; it’s just that nobody is sure what they were for.

I don’t think anyone has really suggested that they represent a technology out of place for their time (which is what I usually think of when I hear something like ‘Forbidden Archaeology’).

[publius911]

Wrap some rope around one and sling it and the archaeologist who gets hit with it will realize real quick what they were used for.

Not bloody likely.
Even primitive man was not an idiot.
Spend weeks engraving a perfect sphere to kill the Sabre-tooth Tiger, when there are a gazillion free rocks scattered everywhere?