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.
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.